Title: A distributed auction-based algorithm for virtual machine placement in multiplayer cloud gaming infrastructures

Authors: Yassine Boujelben; Hasna Fourati

Addresses: ENETCOM, University of Sfax, Sfax, Tunisia ' Digital Research Centre of Sfax, University of Sfax, Sfax, Tunisia

Abstract: Cloud gaming is an emerging service model that basically mimics the cloud computing model. Indeed, intensive computing tasks incurred by the graphical processing of the fairly complex game scenes are exported to remote cloud servers. While this would alleviate the hardware and software requirements on the gaming terminals, it poses serious problems of quality of service and experience. Furthermore, as the massive multiplayer gaming model becomes increasingly popular, computing resources are likely spread across multiple data centres and the need for a distributed assignment algorithm becomes paramount. In this paper, we are interested in the assignment of virtual machines hosted on rendering servers in a distributed cloud gaming infrastructure to requests sent by online gamers. We use the auction algorithm along with several efficient extensions to solve the virtual machine placement problem. We propose a completely distributed implementation technique without any shared memory for our algorithm called DVMP.

Keywords: multiplayer cloud gaming; MCG; virtual machine placement; VMP; matchmaking; distributed auction algorithm; distributed VMP; gaming experience.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCC.2024.136286

International Journal of Cloud Computing, 2024 Vol.13 No.1, pp.80 - 98

Received: 11 Apr 2022
Accepted: 21 Apr 2022
Published online: 26 Jan 2024 *

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