Delay-Sensitive Server Selection System for Online Multiuser Collaboration

2020年，全球有27亿电脑游戏玩家，市场规模达到1593亿美元。游戏现在无疑是娱乐业最大、最受欢迎的市场，在新冠肺炎大流行期间，它的受欢迎程度甚至更高。多用户在线游戏平台面临着一个重大挑战：延迟。未能达到延迟门槛是游戏服务提供商失去订户和收入的主要原因。每100毫秒的延迟会导致玩家性能下降约25%，即使对于通常可以容忍高达500毫秒的第三人称视角游戏也是如此。为了确保延迟不违反游戏流派的延迟阈值，需要一个组织良好的资源管理系统，以便在分布式云/边缘数据中心中更靠近玩家的位置部署大量游戏服务器。但这引出了另一个挑战：如何将最好的服务器分配给一名球员。这一挑战在5G时代加剧，因为5G提供了非常低的网络延迟，所以5G之前只是在玩家延迟范围之外的服务器现在因为5G而在这个范围内。在服务器数量众多的情况下，设计一种最优的服务器选择方法成为一个难以有效解决的多元优化问题。 该项目的目标是实现真实世界的可部署性，并将渥太华大学研究团队的一项发明的技术转让给斯瓦尼奥公司。该发明的研究原型名为延迟敏感服务器选择系统(DS4)，自2017年9月以来在NSERC战略项目下与斯瓦尼奥公司合作开发，并已在该大学的实验室成功验证。DS4是一种服务器选择方法，确保不仅满足延迟门限，而且将玩家之间的延迟差异最小化，从而实现公平博弈。这种公平性在在线视频游戏中非常重要，因为延迟较高的玩家比延迟较低的玩家表现更差，可能会输掉比赛。随着对该项目的进一步研究，我们计划使DS4成为一个强大的系统，它可以在实验室设置之外工作，并在该公司的游戏平台Sarmio MatrixTM上运行。

There were 2.7 billion computer gamers globally in 2020, leading to a market of US$159.3 Billion. Gaming is now easily the largest and most popular market of the entertainment sector, and its popularity has increased even more during the COVID-19 pandemic. A multiuser online gaming platform has one major challenge: delay. Failure to meet the delay threshold is the main reason game service providers lose subscribers and revenue. Every 100 msec of latency results in about a 25% decrease in player performance even for third person perspective games which can generally tolerate delays of up to 500 msec. Ensuring the delay does not violate the game genre's delay threshold requires a well-organized resource management system for deploying a large number of game servers closer to the players in distributed cloud/edge datacenters. But this leads to another challenge: how to assign the best server to a player. This challenge is exacerbated in the age of 5G, because 5G provides very low network delays, so servers that before 5G were just outside a player's delay range are now within that range because of 5G. With so many servers, designing an optimum server selection method becomes a multivariate optimization problem that is difficult to solve efficiently. The goal of this project is to achieve real-world deployability and transfer the technology of an invention by uOttawa's research team to Swarmio Inc. The research prototype of the invention, called Delay-Sensitive Server Selection System (DS4) has been developed since September 2017 under an NSERC Strategic project in partnership with Swarmio, and has been successfully verified at the University's lab. DS4 is a server selection method ensuring that not only the delay threshold is met, but also the variance of delay among players is minimized, leading to fair gaming. This fairness is very important in the case of online video gaming because players with higher latencies perform worse than those with lower latencies and could lose the game. With further research in this project we plan to make DS4 a robust system that works beyond the lab setting and in the company's gaming platform Swarmio MatrixTM.