Energy-Efficient and Quality of Experience-Aware Resource Provisioning for Massively Multiplayer Online Games in the Cloud

Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) routinely have millions of registered players and hundreds of thousands of active concurrent gamers. To guarantee quality of experience (QoE) to a highly variable number of concurrent players, MMOG infrastructure have converted nowadays into cloud computing paradigm. Many leading MMOG companies have begun to build increasing numbers of energy hungry data centers for running the MMOG services requested by the players. A main challenge for MMOG service providers is to find the best tradeoff between two contradictory aims: improving the QoE and reducing energy costs. In this paper, we propose a dynamic resource provisioning scheme for large-scale MMOG services implemented on top of cloud infrastructures which takes advantage of both virtual machine resizing and server consolidation to achieve energy efficiency and desired QoE requirements. Our experimental results indicate that, compared to an over-provisioning of infrastructural resources, our resource provisioning scheme can achieve up to 54.5% energy savings while providing the just-good-enough QoE to gamers under rapidly changing workloads.