An efficient hybrid P2P MMOG cloud architecture for dynamic load management

In recent years, massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) become more and more popular. To increase flexibility of resource allocation, MMOGs can be integrated with cloud computing. In an MMOG cloud environment, virtual machines (VMs) in game servers are allocated to serve players, instead of game servers. A game world is divided into several game regions. Each game region is serviced by at least one VM. In addition, peer-to-peer (P2P) cloud computing has the features of high computation power, scalability, reliability and efficient information sharing of servers. In this paper, we propose a hybrid P2P cloud architecture for MMOGs which includes two-level load management, multi-threshold load management for each game server and load management among game servers. It is suitable for players to interact with P2P cloud servers and it avoids bottlenecks of the current multi-server MMOG architecture. Simulation results show that the proposed hybrid P2P cloud architecture can reduce the average response time by 20.6% compared to the multi-server architecture under medium to high load through flexible allocation of resources (virtual machines). The proposed architecture can also support 10.31% more players under no deadline (300 ms) miss compared to the multi-server architecture.