Deadline-Driven Auctions for NPC host allocation in P2P MMOGs

We present the design, implementation and evaluation of Deadline-Driven Auctions (DDAs), a novel task-mapping infrastructure for heterogeneous distributed environments. DDA is primarily designed for hosting 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: the infrastructure is automatically managed. It efficiently allocates computing resources for large numbers (1000s) of real-time NPC tasks. It supports gaming interactivity by minimising communication latency between NPC hosts. Finally, it supports flexible matchmaking policies, and a friendly incentive policy establishes a cooperative economic model to motivate participants to contribute resources.