Load dynamics of a multiplayer online battle arena and simulative assessment of edge server placements

Free-to-play models, streaming of games and eSports are reasons for online gaming to grow in popularity recently. On the forefront are multiplayer online battle arenas, which gain high popularity by introducing a competitive format that is easy to access and requires cooperation and team play. These games highly rely on fast reaction of the players, which makes latency the key performance indicator of such applications. To obtain low latency, this paper proposes moving game servers close to players towards the edge of the network. The performance of such mechanism highly depends on the geographic distribution of players. By analyzing match histories and statistics, we develop models for the arrival process and location of game requests. This allows us to evaluate the performance of edge server resource migration policies in an event based simulation. Our results show that a high number of edge servers is preferable compared to few larger edge servers to reduce the latency of players. This supports approaches that allow deploying virtual server instances in the back-haul.