Delay-Sensitive Server Selection System for Online Multiuser Collaboration

2020年，全球有27亿电脑游戏玩家，市场规模为1，593亿美元。博彩业目前无疑是娱乐业最大及最受欢迎的市场，而其受欢迎程度在COVID-19疫情期间更是有增无减。多用户在线游戏平台有一个主要挑战：延迟。未能达到延迟阈值是游戏服务提供商失去用户和收入的主要原因。即使对于通常可以容忍高达500毫秒延迟的第三人称视角游戏，每100毫秒的延迟都会导致玩家性能下降约25%。确保延迟不违反游戏类型的延迟阈值需要一个组织良好的资源管理系统，用于在分布式云/边缘游戏中心中更靠近玩家部署大量游戏服务器。但这导致了另一个挑战：如何将最好的服务器分配给玩家。在5G时代，这一挑战更加严峻，因为5G提供了非常低的网络延迟，因此在5G之前刚刚超出玩家延迟范围的服务器现在由于5G而在该范围内。在如此多的服务器情况下，设计最优服务器选择方法成为难以有效求解的多变量优化问题。 该项目的目标是实现现实世界的可部署性，并将uOttawa研究团队的发明技术转让给Swarmio Inc.。本发明的研究原型称为延迟敏感服务器选择系统（DS 4），自2017年9月以来，已在与Swarmio合作的NSERC战略项目下开发，并已在该大学的实验室成功验证。DS 4是一种服务器选择方法，不仅确保满足延迟阈值，而且还确保玩家之间的延迟方差最小化，从而实现公平游戏。这种公平性在在线视频游戏中非常重要，因为具有较高laps的玩家比具有较低laps的玩家表现得更差，并且可能会输掉比赛。通过对该项目的进一步研究，我们计划使DS 4成为一个强大的系统，不仅适用于实验室环境，还适用于公司的游戏平台Swarmio MatrixTM。

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.