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.