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DOI 10.1007/s12652-014-0220-4
ORIGINAL RESEARCH
1 Introduction
Real-time online interactive application (ROIA) is an
emerging large-scale distributed application. The popular
D. Liu (&)
Department of Computer Science, JiNan University,
Guangzhou 510632, China
e-mail: wze2k@163.com
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D. Liu
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But the limitations in authentication, security and consistency make P2P approach to be an impractical solution
for large-scale ROIA (Ghosh et al. 2010; Miller and
Crowcroft 2010).
2.1.3 Cloud approach
Cloud approach is relatively new, few researchers have
proposed solutions. Now the main cloud approach is a
technology called Cloud Gaming. The typical representatives of Cloud Gaming are Onlive (2013), Gaika
(2013).
In this approach, all the game logics and graphics are
rendered in the cloud rather than by the client. The cloud
transfers the results by the way of video streaming. The
user just need play the streaming like YouTube and need a
very small thin client to send users game command to the
cloud.
A major attraction of this approach is that it frees
players from the need to frequently upgrade their computers as they can now play games that host on remote
servers. And the scalability and consistency is easy to
achieve as all the game logics rendered in the cloud.
But because which is transferred to client is video
streaming rather than update information in this approach,
the network bandwidth becomes more important. When a
player makes a move, he cannot see the results until the
cloud receives the command, processes the move, renders a
new screen, and delivers the screen to the client. Moreover,
the traditional compensation techniques (Bernier 2001),
such as dead reckoning (Pantel and Wolf 2002), cannot be
used in cloud gaming, because those techniques require
game state information which are not available in cloud
gaming clients.
Server
Group 1
Server
Group 2
AoI
Fig. 1 Zoning
Fig. 2 An example of area of interest
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D. Liu
Active Layer
Location A
ROIA
Server
(RS)
MRCP
Local
Controller
(MLC)
Multi-ROIA
Cloud
Platform
(MRCP)
Shadow Layer
Location B
MLC
RS
Location C
MLC
ROIA User
RS
ROIA User
ROIA User
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D. Liu
A2
A1
A3
S1
S2
A5
A6
A4
A5 f S1; 0; 0 g;
A6 f S1; 3; 1; S2; 3; 2 g;
A7
A8
(A1, 1, 2)
(A1, 3, 2)
A1
A1
(A1, 1, 1)
(a)
(A1, 3, 1)
(b)
(c)
After this definition, each block in Fig. 7 can be conveniently represented by triples (as shown in Fig. 7). The
mapping relationship between the shadow layer and the
active layer also can be easily represented by the sets of
triples. For example, the active layer region covered by S1
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A1
A2
The total cost of this case is the largest one in these three
cases. But from the Fig. 8, it can be observed that the
probability of this case happening is very small.
A3
S1
E1
A4
A7
S3
E2
A5
A6
E3
A8
A9
S2
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D. Liu
In the third strategy, the cost of migration to the different servers is not the same, but the costs are all larger
than the other strategy.
Each of the first and second strategy has its own merits
and disadvantages. The merit of first strategy is that the
entities of A8 which may have close interactions are still in
one server. But in the second strategy, entities of A8 are
separated and placed on S1or S2, so the cost of interactions
between these entities increase.
The advantage of the second strategy is that there are no
more additional work, such as creating new entity and
transferring related information. Because half of A8 shadow entities are already in S1 server, and the other half are
in S2 server. In contrast, in the first strategy, it will have the
additional work to ensure S1 or S2 server take control of
the whole A8.
4.2.2 Server crash in shadow layer
Due to the actual function of ROIA is executed in the
active servers and the shadow server has only redundant
copy, so the server crash in shadow layer has no marked
impact on the actual application. Moreover, the recovery of
shadow server crash is relatively simple. It just needs to fix
server and synchronize related information from the corresponding active servers.
In fact, the worst case is the corresponding servers of the
two layers are both crashed. In this case, the current information of user will be lost. However, taking advantage of
other servers (login server, character server), the entity state
information can be recovered to a little old status. Of cause,
the probability of this worst case happening is very small.
In summary, since the introduction of the overlapping
layer, the processing of server crash becomes relatively easy.
4.3 Load balancing
In our new architecture, there are two main approaches to
load balancing: dynamic zoning and shadow server
assisting. These approaches can be used alone, and can also
be used in combination.
5 Conclusions
As an emerging large-scale distribute application, ROIA
has high demands on performance. And a robust and efficient architecture with suitable scalability is essential to
ROIA. Previous works are almost based on the C/S and
P2P mode, and these architectures cannot be simply copied
to cloud computing environment. Therefore, we study the
architecture of ROIA in the cloud computing environment.
We proposed the MRCP, a new approach to achieve
high scalability in ROIA under cloud environment. Based
on these previous works, we propose a new overlapping
architecture with the robust, efficient and scalable characters, which can be deployed on MRCP or other cloud
computing environment.
In this paper, we introduce related works and some
techniques used in our new architecture. And then we
present our new overlapping architecture. We focus on
analyze the three merits of new architecture: seamless
migration across cells, protecting against server crash and
dynamic load balancing. We analyze the various processing strategies and the corresponding costs. This paper sheds
a little light to the related further research on ROIA.
Acknowledgments This work is supported by Guangzhou Science
and Technology Project (2010Y0-C681); Guangdong Science and
Technology Project (2010B060100056); Natural Science Foundation
of Guangdong (S2012010008831).
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