Operation analysis of massively multiplayer online games on unreliable resources

We investigate the use of a new Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming (MMOG) ecosystem consisting of end-users, game providers, game operators, and Cloud resource providers, for autonomous, self-adaptive hosting and operation of MMOGs on unreliable resources. For this purpose, we developed an MMOG simulator compliant with our ecosystem, supported by a dynamic resource provisioning and load balancing algorithm. Using our simulator in which we inject traces collected from a real-world MMOG and resource characteristics from 16 Cloud providers, we study the impact on the involved actors by considering different resource availability levels. We highlight the advantages of dynamic resource allocation over the static overprovisioning with respect to two types of metrics: QoS offered to the clients and financial profit of game providers and operators.