Delay-Sensitive Server Selection System for Online Multiuser Collaboration

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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.