Blue Banana: Resilience to Avatar Mobility in Distributed MMOGs

Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) recently
emerged as a popular class of applications with millions
of users. To offer acceptable gaming experience, such
applications need to render the virtual world surrounding
the player with a very low latency. However, current state-of-
the-art MMOGs based on peer-to-peer overlays fail to
satisfy these requirements. This happens because avatar
mobility implies many data exchanges through the overlay.
As state-of-the-art overlays do not anticipate this mobility,
the needed data is not delivered on time, which leads
to transient failures at the application level. To solve this
problem, we propose Blue Banana, a mechanism that models
and predicts avatar movement, allowing the overlay to
adapt itself by anticipation to the MMOG needs. Our evaluation
is based on large-scale traces derived from Second
life. It shows that our anticipation mechanism decreases by
20% the number of transient failures with only a network
overhead of 2%.