Quality of Service Aware Cost Optimization for Online Gaming Services in IaaS Clouds

Prompted by the remarkable progress in cloud computing, more and more game service providers are starting to deploy their gaming applications on infrastructure as a service cloud. To ensure quality of service required by gamers, game service providers need to maintain a large number of cloud servers running game instances requested by players. Therefore, game service providers need not only pay attention to the costs of operating games, but also consider the quality of game services. This paper proposes a quality-of-service aware cost optimization scheme for online gaming services deployed on IaaS clouds which combines dynamic virtual machine provisioning and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) based gamer request dispatching to reduce the operating costs while ensuring quality of service. The effectiveness of our proposed scheme is assessed by simulation experiments based on the real-world data sets. The results show that, compared to the state-of-the-art approaches applied to similar problems, our scheme can achieve up to 35% cost savings while providing the just-good-enough quality of service to gamers under rapidly changing workloads.