Deadline-Driven Auctions for NPC host allocation in P2P MMOGs

This paper presents the design, implementation and evaluation of Deadline-Driven Auctions (DDA), a novel task mapping infrastructure for heterogeneous distributed environments. DDA is primarily designed to support the hosting of Non-Player Characters (NPCs) in P2P Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs). Experimental and analytical results demonstrate that DDA provides four significant advantages. It is self-organising as the infrastructure can be automatically assembled and managed. It efficiently allocates computing resources for large numbers of real-time NPC tasks in a simulated P2P MMOG with the better part of 1000 players. It supports gaming interactivity by keeping the communication latency among NPC hosts and ordinary players low. Finally, it supports flexible matchmaking policies, and with a friendly incentive policy, can establish a cooperative economic model that helps motivate participants to contribute their resources to the system.