Rendering Server Allocation for MMORPG Players in Cloud Gaming

Abstract

Cloud gaming services enable users with heterogeneous device capabilities to get access to game titles with hardware demanding specifications. While visual quality requirements are to be satisfied by the cloud rendering servers, latency is one of the major problems which arises as most of the tasks are offloaded remotely. Cloud gaming players must experience latency below a certain acceptable limit for the game to be responsive with playable visual quality under limited bandwidth capacity. Playing multiplayer games in the cloud needs to cater for player interactions and their commonality especially if they are playing in the same virtual space. The main characteristic of cloud gaming is that the whole rendering pipeline occurs in the cloud; therefore, rendering optimization by reusing common information across players is possible by taking advantage of multi-view rendering. In this paper, we propose a cloud gaming architecture for MMORPGs which involves hundreds of players as well as online optimization heuristic algorithms on rendering server allocations in order to minimize rendering server rental cost from game provider’s point of view. In addition, we also compare the performance of those online heuristics with an offline lower bound in order to observe the scalability of the online scenario.