Cloud for Gaming

Cloud for Gaming refers to the use of cloud computing technologies to build large-scale gaming infrastructures, with the goal of improving scalability and responsiveness, improve the user's experience and enable new business models.Comment: Encyclopedia of Computer Graphics and Games. Newton Lee (Editor). Springer International Publishing, 2015, ISBN 978-3-319-08234-

Exploiting P2P in the Creation of Game Worlds

Peer-to-peer networks are a promising platform for supporting entirely decentralized, distributed multi-user gaming; however, multi-player games typically require highly predictable performance from the underlying network. This is at odds with the inherently unreliable nature of peer-to-peer environments. Existing approaches to providing peer-to-peer support for multi-player gaming focus on compensating for the unpredictability of the underlying network. We propose that rather than trying to compensate for these factors, they can be exploited together with information about the peer-to-peer network in order to address the problem of maintaining a novel gaming experience in the absence of a central authority. In order to explore our proposition, we model the measurable properties of P2P networks within a distributed multi-player game – NetWorld. We do this in such a way that the heterogeneous and unpredictable nature of the peer-to-peer environment becomes a positive part of the player’s experience

On the Benefit of Virtualization: Strategies for Flexible Server Allocation

Virtualization technology facilitates a dynamic, demand-driven allocation and migration of servers. This paper studies how the flexibility offered by network virtualization can be used to improve Quality-of-Service parameters such as latency, while taking into account allocation costs. A generic use case is considered where both the overall demand issued for a certain service (for example, an SAP application in the cloud, or a gaming application) as well as the origins of the requests change over time (e.g., due to time zone effects or due to user mobility), and we present online and optimal offline strategies to compute the number and location of the servers implementing this service. These algorithms also allow us to study the fundamental benefits of dynamic resource allocation compared to static systems. Our simulation results confirm our expectations that the gain of flexible server allocation is particularly high in scenarios with moderate dynamics

Optimal configuration of active and backup servers for augmented reality cooperative games

Interactive applications as online games and mobile devices have become more and more popular in recent years. From their combination, new and interesting cooperative services could be generated. For instance, gamers endowed with Augmented Reality (AR) visors connected as wireless nodes in an ad-hoc network, can interact with each other while immersed in the game. To enable this vision, we discuss here a hybrid architecture enabling game play in ad-hoc mode instead of the traditional client-server setting. In our architecture, one of the player nodes also acts as the server of the game, whereas other backup server nodes are ready to become active servers in case of disconnection of the network i.e. due to low energy level of the currently active server. This allows to have a longer gaming session before incurring in disconnections or energy exhaustion. In this context, the server election strategy with the aim of maximizing network lifetime is not so straightforward. To this end, we have hence analyzed this issue through a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model and both numerical and simulation-based analysis shows that the backup servers solution fulfills its design objective

Incorporating Online Instruction in Academic Libraries: Getting Ahead of the Curve

A sea change in higher education is shaping the way many libraries deliver instruction to their students and faculty. Years of technological innovation and changes in the way that people discover and use information has made online instruction an essential part of a library\u27s teaching and learning program. In order to evaluate our library\u27s online instruction program and to determine its future goals, we analyzed the technology, pedagogical models, organizational structures, administrative supports, and partnerships we would need in order to succeed. Our findings may be useful for libraries reassessing their own online instruction programs

Towards a Scalable Dynamic Spatial Database System

With the rise of GPS-enabled smartphones and other similar mobile devices, massive amounts of location data are available. However, no scalable solutions for soft real-time spatial queries on large sets of moving objects have yet emerged. In this paper we explore and measure the limits of actual algorithms and implementations regarding different application scenarios. And finally we propose a novel distributed architecture to solve the scalability issues.Comment: (2012