Dynamic Resource Provisioning with Hotspot Anticipation for MMOG Clouds

We propose a dynamic resource provisioning with hotspot anticipation scheme, called NN-Player+DRP-HA that employs a finite state machine model to monitor the movement of avatars in a virtual world. Furthermore, we use a finite state machine to represent possible avatar states and state transitions. By combining the state of each avatar in a game zone with a neural network (NN) predictor, we may figure out potential workload produced by hotspots, and then allocate appropriate computing resources to support the game zone. Experimental results support that the proposed NN-Player+DRP-HA scheme can avoid most of under-allocation events with an acceptable over-allocation rate. Compared with a representative dynamic resource provisioning method, called NN-Player+DRP, the proposed NN-Player+DRP-HA reduces the probability of under-allocation events from 2.16% to 0.42% (80% improvement) in terms of CPU capacity of a VM, under the premise of controlling the CPU over-allocation rate within the CPU capacity of one VM.