A write-operation-adaptable replication system for multiplayer cloud gaming

Abstract

Cloud gaming is getting more and more attention due to the growth of smart devices (smartphones, tables, and notebooks). When players update data, a cloud gaming system replicates game states to support massive users for maintaining data consistency. A popular cloud game could incur a huge amount of write operations to increase the complexity for maintaining data consistency. Traffic for transmitting replicas and maintaining consistency may overwhelm networks and raise error rates of the cloud nodes. This paper studies the problem of replicas for cloud gaming systems and presents a write-operation-adaptable replication system (WOARS). WOARS periodically calculates the weights of write operations according to the services with different consistency requirements and assigns replicas between datacenters according to the weights. As compared to other replication protocols, WOARS can efficiently reduce average latency, improve QoS as well as reduce traffic overhead.