Dynamic Service Provisioning for Multiplayer Online Games

Multiplayer online games have become a popular class of distributed applications with an enormous amount of running Internet-based game sessions. The basic concept of how to provide game services for users has not changed for years: High-bandwidth, dedicated game servers are statically set up to continuously run game sessions, regardless of how many users actually play. This straightforward approach is inefficient, because it does not take the current user demand into account, thus wasting resources. In this paper, we present a novel system architecture for organizing dynamic, on-demand game services for single-server online games. Our system allows users to book game services for immediate play or some time in advance. The system takes the users’ demands into account and dynamically sets up the required server resources in an efficient way. In contrast to the usually offered flat-rate rental of servers on at least a monthly basis, our system allows to charge users depending on the actual services usage and to incorporate new pay-per-use business models.