Towards efficient edge cloud augmentation for virtual reality MMOGs

Abstract

With the popularity of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) and Virtual Reality (VR) technologies, VR-MMOGs are developing quickly, demanding ever faster gaming interactions and image rendering. In this paper, we identify three main challenges of VR-MMOGs: (1)a stringent latency requirement for frequent local view change responses, (2) a high bandwidth requirement for constant refreshing, and (3)a large scale requirement for a large number of simultaneous players. Understanding that a cloud-centric gaming architecture may struggle to deliver the latency/bandwidth requirements, the game development community is attempting to leverage edge cloud computing. However, one problem remains unsolved: how to distribute the work among the user device, the edge clouds, and the center cloud to meet all three requirements especially when users are mobile. In this paper, we propose a hybrid gaming architecture that achieves clever work distribution. It places local view change updates on edge clouds for immediate responses, frame rendering on edge clouds for high bandwidth, and global game state updates on the center cloud for user scalability. In addition, we propose an efficient service placement algorithm based on a Markov decision process. This algorithm dynamically places a user's gaming service on edge clouds while the user moves through different access points. It also co-places multiple users to facilitate game world sharing and reduce the overall migration overhead. We derive optimal solutions and devise efficient heuristic approaches. We also study different algorithm implementations to speed up the runtime. Through detailed simulation studies, we validate our placement algorithms and also show that our architecture has the potential to meet all three requirements of VR-MMOGs.