179 research outputs found
Metaverse: A Vision, Architectural Elements, and Future Directions for Scalable and Realtime Virtual Worlds
With the emergence of Cloud computing, Internet of Things-enabled
Human-Computer Interfaces, Generative Artificial Intelligence, and
high-accurate Machine and Deep-learning recognition and predictive models,
along with the Post Covid-19 proliferation of social networking, and remote
communications, the Metaverse gained a lot of popularity. Metaverse has the
prospective to extend the physical world using virtual and augmented reality so
the users can interact seamlessly with the real and virtual worlds using
avatars and holograms. It has the potential to impact people in the way they
interact on social media, collaborate in their work, perform marketing and
business, teach, learn, and even access personalized healthcare. Several works
in the literature examine Metaverse in terms of hardware wearable devices, and
virtual reality gaming applications. However, the requirements of realizing the
Metaverse in realtime and at a large-scale need yet to be examined for the
technology to be usable. To address this limitation, this paper presents the
temporal evolution of Metaverse definitions and captures its evolving
requirements. Consequently, we provide insights into Metaverse requirements. In
addition to enabling technologies, we lay out architectural elements for
scalable, reliable, and efficient Metaverse systems, and a classification of
existing Metaverse applications along with proposing required future research
directions
Sla Management in a Collaborative Network Of Federated Clouds: The Cloudland
Cloud services have always promised to be available, flexible, and speedy. However, not a single Cloud provider can deliver such promises to their distinctly demanding customers. Cloud providers have a constrained geographical presence, and are willing to invest in infrastructure only when it is profitable to them. Cloud federation is a concept that collectively combines segregated Cloud services to create an extended pool of resources for Clouds to competently deliver their promised level of services. This dissertation is concerned with studying the governing aspects related to the federation of Clouds through collaborative networking. The main objective of this dissertation is to define a framework for a Cloud network that considers balancing the trade-offs among customers’ various quality of service (QoS) requirements, as well as providers\u27 resources utilization. We propose a network of federated Clouds, CloudLend, that creates a platform for Cloud providers to collaborate, and for customers to expand their service selections. We also define and specify a service level agreement (SLA) management model in order to govern and administer the relationships established between different Cloud services in CloudLend. We define a multi-level SLA specification model to annotate and describe QoS terms, in addition to a game theory-based automated SLA negotiation model that supports both customers and providers in negotiating SLA terms, and guiding them towards signing a contract. We also define an adaptive agent-based SLA monitoring model which identifies the root causes of SLA violations, and impartially distributes any updates and changes in established SLAs to all relevant entities. Formal verification proved that our proposed framework assures customers with maximum optimized guarantees to their QoS requirements, in addition to supporting Cloud providers to make informed resource utilization decisions. Additionally, simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our SLA management model. Our proposed Cloud Lend network and its SLA management model paves the way to resource sharing among different Cloud providers, which allows for the providers’ lock-in constraints to be broken, allowing effortless migration of customers’ applications across different providers whenever is needed
Game analytics - maximizing the value of player data
During the years of the Information Age, technological advances in the computers,
satellites, data transfer, optics, and digital storage has led to the collection of an
immense mass of data on everything from business to astronomy, counting on the
power of digital computing to sort through the amalgam of information and generate meaning from the data. Initially, in the 1970s and 1980s of the previous century,
data were stored on disparate structures and very rapidly became overwhelming. The
initial chaos led to the creation of structured databases and database management
systems to assist with the management of large corpuses of data, and notably, the
effective and efficient retrieval of information from databases. The rise of the database management system increased the already rapid pace of information
gathering.peer-reviewe
Models, methods, and tools for developing MMOG backends on commodity clouds
Online multiplayer games have grown to unprecedented scales, attracting millions of players
worldwide. The revenue from this industry has already eclipsed well-established entertainment
industries like music and films and is expected to continue its rapid growth in the future.
Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) have also been extensively used in research
studies and education, further motivating the need to improve their development process.
The development of resource-intensive, distributed, real-time applications like MMOG backends
involves a variety of challenges. Past research has primarily focused on the development and
deployment of MMOG backends on dedicated infrastructures such as on-premise data centers
and private clouds, which provide more flexibility but are expensive and hard to set up and
maintain. A limited set of works has also focused on utilizing the Infrastructure-as-a-Service
(IaaS) layer of public clouds to deploy MMOG backends. These clouds can offer various advantages
like a lower barrier to entry, a larger set of resources, etc. but lack resource elasticity,
standardization, and focus on development effort, from which MMOG backends can greatly
benefit.
Meanwhile, other research has also focused on solving various problems related to consistency,
performance, and scalability. Despite major advancements in these areas, there is no standardized
development methodology to facilitate these features and assimilate the development of
MMOG backends on commodity clouds. This thesis is motivated by the results of a systematic
mapping study that identifies a gap in research, evident from the fact that only a handful
of studies have explored the possibility of utilizing serverless environments within commodity
clouds to host these types of backends. These studies are mostly vision papers and do
not provide any novel contributions in terms of methods of development or detailed analyses
of how such systems could be developed. Using the knowledge gathered from this mapping
study, several hypotheses are proposed and a set of technical challenges is identified, guiding
the development of a new methodology.
The peculiarities of MMOG backends have so far constrained their development and deployment
on commodity clouds despite rapid advancements in technology. To explore whether such
environments are viable options, a feasibility study is conducted with a minimalistic MMOG
prototype to evaluate a limited set of public clouds in terms of hosting MMOG backends. Foli
lowing encouraging results from this study, this thesis first motivates toward and then presents
a set of models, methods, and tools with which scalable MMOG backends can be developed
for and deployed on commodity clouds. These are encapsulated into a software development
framework called Athlos which allows software engineers to leverage the proposed development
methodology to rapidly create MMOG backend prototypes that utilize the resources of
these clouds to attain scalable states and runtimes. The proposed approach is based on a dynamic
model which aims to abstract the data requirements and relationships of many types of
MMOGs. Based on this model, several methods are outlined that aim to solve various problems
and challenges related to the development of MMOG backends, mainly in terms of performance
and scalability. Using a modular software architecture, and standardization in common development
areas, the proposed framework aims to improve and expedite the development process
leading to higher-quality MMOG backends and a lower time to market. The models and methods
proposed in this approach can be utilized through various tools during the development
lifecycle.
The proposed development framework is evaluated qualitatively and quantitatively. The thesis
presents three case study MMOG backend prototypes that validate the suitability of the proposed
approach. These case studies also provide a proof of concept and are subsequently used
to further evaluate the framework. The propositions in this thesis are assessed with respect to
the performance, scalability, development effort, and code maintainability of MMOG backends
developed using the Athlos framework, using a variety of methods such as small and large-scale
simulations and more targeted experimental setups. The results of these experiments uncover
useful information about the behavior of MMOG backends. In addition, they provide evidence
that MMOG backends developed using the proposed methodology and hosted on serverless
environments can: (a) support a very high number of simultaneous players under a given latency
threshold, (b) elastically scale both in terms of processing power and memory capacity
and (c) significantly reduce the amount of development effort. The results also show that this
methodology can accelerate the development of high-performance, distributed, real-time applications
like MMOG backends, while also exposing the limitations of Athlos in terms of code
maintainability.
Finally, the thesis provides a reflection on the research objectives, considerations on the hypotheses
and technical challenges, and outlines plans for future work in this domain
Design of a horizontally scalable backend application for online games
Mobile game market is increasing in popularity year after year, attracting a wide audience of independent developers who must endure the competition of other more resourceful game companies. Players expect high quality games and experiences, while developers strive to monetize. Researches have shown a correlation between some features of a game and its likelihood to succeed and be a potential candidate to enter the top grossing lists.
This thesis focuses on identifying the trending features found on the current most successful games, and proposes the design of a scalable, flexible and modular backend application which integrates all the services needed for fulfilling the common needs of a mobile online game.
A microservice oriented architecture have been used as a basis for the system design, leading to a modular decomposition of features into small, independent, reusable services. The system and microservices design comply with the Reactive Manifesto, allowing the application to reach responsiveness, elasticity, resiliency and asynchronicity. For its properties, the application is suitable to serve on a cloud environment covering the requirements for small games and popular games with high load of traffic and many concurrent players.
The thesis, in addition to the application and microservices design, includes a discussion on the technology stack for a possible implementation and recommended setup for three use case scenarios
Cloud computing and adult literacy: How cloud computing can sustain the promise of adult learning
Adult literacy in Canada consists of a patchwork of large and small adult
education providers: many of them are autonomous community societies,
some are school boards, and others are community college based, as well
as a range of independent community-based groups. Funding for adult
literacy comes from several pockets: from different provincial and/or federal
government departments and from charitable organizations. Much of
the federal funding is short term in response to shifting government priorities.
Indeed, Crooks et al. [1] suggest that the ongoing funding search,
with the attendant application and reporting activities, detracts from the
ability to provide more effectively planned and sustainable adult education
programs. A major challenge for adult literacy providers is that while their
client base has significant human and economic potential, low-literacy
adults are not perceived as large contributors to the economy, and thus,
much of the funding is intermittent—from project to project.Alpha Adult Literacy Ontari
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