Abstract
Cloud gaming has gained significant popularity recently due to many important benefits such as removal of device constraints, instant-on, and cross-platform. The properties of intensive resource demands and dynamic workloads make cloud gaming appropriate to be supported by an elastic cloud platform. Facing a large user population, a fundamental problem is how to provide satisfactory cloud gaming service at modest cost. We observe that the software storage cost could be substantial compared to the server running cost in cloud gaming using elastic cloud resources. Therefore, in this article, we address the server provisioning problem for cloud gaming to optimize both the server running cost and the software storage cost. We find that the distribution of game software among servers and the selection of server types both trigger tradeoffs between the software storage cost and the server running cost in cloud gaming. We formulate the problem with a stochastic model and employ queueing theory to conduct a solid theoretical analysis of the system behaviors under different request dispatching policies. We then propose several classes of algorithms to approximate the optimal solution. The proposed algorithms are evaluated by extensive experiments using real-world parameters. The results show that the proposed Ordered and Genetic algorithms are computationally efficient, nearly cost-optimal, and highly robust to dynamic changes.
- 2016. Damai. Retrieved from http://www.pyou.com/.Google Scholar
- 2016. GeForce Now. Retrieved from http://www.geforce.com/.Google Scholar
- 2016. PlayStation Now. Retrieved from https://www.playstation.com/.Google Scholar
- 2017. Amazon EC2. Retrieved from https://aws.amazon.com/ec2.Google Scholar
- Ivo Adan and Jacques Resing. 2001. Queueing Theory. Dept. of Mathematics and Computing Science, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands.Google Scholar
- Hamed Ahmadi, Saman Zad Tootaghaj, Mahmoud Reza Hashemi, and Shervin Shirmohammadi. 2014. A game attention model for efficient bit rate allocation in cloud gaming. Multimedia Systems 20, 5 (2014), 485--501. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- M. Basiri and A. Rasoolzadegan. 2016. Delay-aware resource provisioning for cost-efficient cloud gaming. IEEE Trans. Circ. Syst. Video Technol. 28, 4 (April 2018), 972--983.Google Scholar
- Carter Bays. 1977. A comparison of next-fit, first-fit, and best-fit. Commun. ACM 20, 3 (Mar. 1977), 191--192. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Onno J. Boxma, J. W. Cohen, and N. Huffels. 1979. Approximations of the mean waiting time in an M/G/s queueing system. Operat. Res. 27, 6 (1979), 1115--1127. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Wei Cai, Ryan Shea, Chun-Ying Huang, Kuan-Ta Chen, Jiangchuan Liu, Victor C. M. Leung, and Cheng-Hsin Hsu. 2016. The future of cloud gaming. Proc. IEEE 104, 4 (Apr. 2016), 687--691.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- Mehmet Tolga Cezik and Pierre L’Ecuyer. 2008. Staffing multiskill call centers via linear programming and simulation. Manage. Sci. 54, 2 (2008), 310--323. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Wah Chun Chan. 2000. Performance Analysis of Telecommunications and Local Area Networks. Kluwer Academic Publishers. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Sharon Choy, Bernard Wong, Gwendal Simon, and Catherine Rosenberg. 2014. A hybrid edge-cloud architecture for reducing on-demand gaming latency. Multimedia Syst. 20, 5 (2014), 503--519. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Mark Claypool, David Finkel, Alexander Grant, and Michael Solano. 2014. On the performance of OnLive thin client games. Multimedia Syst. 20, 5 (Oct 2014), 471--484. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Lawrence Davis. 1991. Handbook of Genetic Algorithms.Google Scholar
- Yunhua Deng, Yusen Li, Xueyan Tang, and Wentong Cai. 2016. Server allocation for multiplayer cloud gaming. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM on Multimedia Conference. ACM, 918--927. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- David Finkel, Mark Claypool, Sam Jaffe, Thinh Nguyen, and Brendan Stephen. 2014. Assignment of games to servers in the OnLive cloud game system. In Proceedings of the 2014 13th Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games. IEEE, 1--3. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Anshul Gandhi, Varun Gupta, Mor Harchol-Balter, and Michael A. Kozuch. 2010. Optimality analysis of energy-performance tradeoff for server farm management. Perf. Eval. 67, 11 (2010), 1155--1171. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Sushant Goel and Rajkumar Buyya. 2006. Data replication strategies in wide area distributed systems. Enterprise Service Computing: From Concept to Deployment, R. G. Qiu (Ed.). Idea Group Inc., Hershey, PA, USA, 211--241.Google Scholar
- Mahdi Hemmati, Abbas Javadtalab, Ali Asghar Nazari Shirehjini, Shervin Shirmohammadi, and Tarik Arici. 2013. Game as video: Bit rate reduction through adaptive object encoding. In Proceeding of the 23rd ACM Workshop on Network and Operating Systems Support for Digital Audio and Video. ACM, 7--12. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Per Hokstad. 1978. Approximations for the M/G/m queue. Operat. Res. 26, 3 (1978), 510--523. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Hua-Jun Hong, De-Yu Chen, Chun-Ying Huang, Kuan-Ta Chen, and Cheng-Hsin Hsu. 2014. Placing virtual machines to optimize cloud gaming experience. IEEE Trans. Cloud Comput. 3, 1 (2015), 42--53.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- Yu-Ju Hong, Jiachen Xue, and Mithuna Thottethodi. 2011. Dynamic server provisioning to minimize cost in an IaaS cloud. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGMETRICS Joint International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems. ACM, 147--148. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Chun-Ying Huang, Cheng-Hsin Hsu, Yu-Chun Chang, and Kuan-Ta Chen. 2013. GamingAnywhere: An open cloud gaming system. In Proceedings of the 4th ACM Multimedia Systems Conference. 36--47. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Lei Jiao, Jun Lit, Wei Du, and Xiaoming Fu. 2014. Multi-objective data placement for multi-cloud socially aware services. In Proceedings of the 2014 IEEE Conference on Computer Communications. IEEE, 28--36.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- A. A. Karawia and S. S. Askar. 2015. On solving pentadiagonal linear systems via transformations. Mathematical Problems in Engineering, vol. 2015. Article ID 232456, 9 pages.Google Scholar
- Ger Koole and Jerome Talim. 2000. Exponential approximation of multi-skill call centers architecture. In Proceedings of QNETs. 1--10.Google Scholar
- Kyungmin Lee, David Chu, Eduardo Cuervo, Alec Wolman, and Jason Flinn. 2014. Demo: DeLorean: Using Speculation to Enable Low-latency Continuous Interaction for Mobile Cloud Gaming. ACM. 347--347. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Kang-Won Lee, Bong-Jun Ko, and Seraphin Calo. 2005. Adaptive server selection for large scale interactive online games. Comput. Netw. 49, 1 (2005), 84--102. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Yeng-Ting Lee, Kuan-Ta Chen, Yun-Maw Cheng, and Chin-Laung Lei. 2011. World of warcraft avatar history dataset. In Proceedings of the 2nd Annual ACM Conference on Multimedia Systems. ACM, 123--128. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Yeng-Ting Lee, Kuan-Ta Chen, Han-I Su, and Chin-Laung Lei. 2012. Are all games equally cloud-gaming-friendly? an electromyographic approach. In Proceedings of the 11th Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games (NetGames’12), 2012. IEEE, 1--6. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Yusen Li, Yunhua Deng, Xueyan Tang, Wentong Cai, Xiaoguang Liu, and Gang Wang. 2017. On server provisioning for cloud gaming. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM on Multimedia Conference. ACM. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Yusen Li, Xueyan Tang, and Wentong Cai. 2014. On dynamic bin packing for resource allocation in the cloud. In Proceedings of the 26th ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures. 2--11. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Yusen Li, Xueyan Tang, and Wentong Cai. 2015. Play request dispatching for efficient virtual machine usage in cloud gaming. IEEE Trans. Circ. Syst. Vid. Technol. 25, 12 (2015), 2052--2063.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- Yusen Li, Xueyan Tang, and Wentong Cai. 2016. Dynamic bin packing for on-demand cloud resource allocation. IEEE Trans. Parallel Distrib. Syst. 27, 1 (2016), 157--170. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Minghong Lin, Adam Wierman, Lachlan L. H. Andrew, and Eno Thereska. 2013. Dynamic right-sizing for power-proportional data centers. IEEE/ACM Trans. Network. 21, 5 (2013), 1378--1391. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Tadahiko Murata, Hisao Ishibuchi, and Hideo Tanaka. 1996. Genetic algorithms for flowshop scheduling problems. Comput. Industr. Eng. 30, 4 (1996), 1061--1071. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- David Poole. 2010. Linear Algebra: A Modern Introduction. Cengage Learning, Inc.Google Scholar
- Ryan Shea, Di Fu, and Jiangchuan Liu. 2015. Rhizome: Utilizing the public cloud to provide 3D gaming infrastructure. In Proceedings of the 6th ACM Multimedia Systems Conference. ACM, 97--100. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Jing Tang, Xueyan Tang, and Junsong Yuan. 2015. Optimizing inter-server communication for online social networks. In Proceedings of the 2015 IEEE 35th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS’15). IEEE, 215--224.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- S. Tavare. 1979. A note on finite homogeneous continuous-time Markov chains. Biometrics 35, 4 (1979), 831--834.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- Feng Wang, Jiangchuan Liu, and Minghua Chen. 2012. CALMS: Cloud-assisted live media streaming for globalized demands with time/region diversities. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Communications 2012. IEEE, 199--207.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- Qiushi Wang, Ming Ming Tan, Xueyan Tang, and Wentong Cai. 2017. Minimizing cost in iaas clouds via scheduled instance reservation. In Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE 37th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS’17). IEEE, 1565--1574.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- Wei Wang, Baochun Li, and Ben Liang. 2013. To reserve or not to reserve: Optimal online multi-instance acquisition in IaaS clouds. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC’13). 13--22.Google Scholar
- D. Wu, Z. Xue, and J. He. 2014. iCloudAccess: Cost-effective streaming of video games from the cloud with low latency. IEEE Trans. Circ. Syst. Vid. Technol. 24, 8 (2014), 1405--1416.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- Yu Wu, Chuan Wu, Bo Li, Xuanjia Qiu, and Francis C. M. Lau. 2011. Cloudmedia: When cloud on demand meets video on demand. In Proceedings of the 2011 31st International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS’11). IEEE, 268--277. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Fatos Xhafa. 2012. Data replication and synchronization in P2P collaborative systems. In Proceedings of the 2012 IEEE 26th International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications. IEEE, 7--7. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Jiong Xie, Shu Yin, Xiaojun Ruan, Zhiyang Ding, Yun Tian, James Majors, Adam Manzanares, and Xiao Qin. 2010. Improving mapreduce performance through data placement in heterogeneous hadoop clusters. In Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE International Symposium on Parallel & Distributed Processing, Workshops and Phd Forum (IPDPSW’10). IEEE, 1--9.Google Scholar
- Yuhong Zhao, Hong Jiang, Ke Zhou, Zhijie Huang, and Ping Huang. 2014. Meeting service level agreement cost-effectively for video-on-demand applications in the cloud. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Communications 2014. IEEE, 298--306.Google Scholar
- Hanying Zheng and Xueyan Tang. 2013. On server provisioning for distributed interactive applications. In Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE 33rd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS’13). IEEE, 500--509. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Hanying Zheng and Xueyan Tang. 2016. The server provisioning problem for continuous distributed interactive applications. IEEE Trans. Parallel Distrib. Syst. 27, 1 (2016), 271--285. Google Scholar
Digital Library
Index Terms
Cost-Efficient Server Provisioning for Cloud Gaming
Recommendations
Server Allocation for Multiplayer Cloud Gaming
MM '16: Proceedings of the 24th ACM international conference on MultimediaAdvances in cloud computing and GPU virtualization are allowing the game industry to move into a cloud gaming era. While shifting standalone video games to the cloud gaming mode is straightforward, adapting multiplayer online games to the cloud gaming ...
On Server Provisioning for Cloud Gaming
MM '17: Proceedings of the 25th ACM international conference on MultimediaCloud gaming has gained significant popularity recently due to many important benefits such as removal of device constraints, instant-on and cross-platform, etc. The properties of intensive resource demands and dynamic workloads make cloud gaming ...
Toward Delay-Efficient Game-Aware Data Centers for Cloud Gaming
Special Section on Multimedia Big Data: Networking and Special Section on Best Papers From ACM MMSYS/NOSSDAV 2015Gaming on demand is an emerging service that has recently started to garner prominence in the gaming industry. Cloud-based video games provide affordable, flexible, and high-performance solutions for end-users with constrained computing resources and ...






Comments