Chao Zhang
Keith W. Ross
ABSTRACT
The convergence of games and online social platforms is an exploding phenomena. The continued success of social games hinges critically on the ability to deliver smooth and highly-interactive experiences to end-users. However, it is extremely challenging to satisfy the stringent performance requirements of online social games.
Motivated by an Xbox Live online social gaming application, we address the problem of concurrent messaging, where the maximum latency of game messages has to be tightly bounded. Learning from a large-scale measurement experiment, we conclude that the generic transport protocol TCP, currently being used in the game, cannot ensure concurrent messaging. We develop a new UDP-based transport protocol, named Pangolin. The core of Pangolin is an adaptive decision making engine derived from the Markov Decision Process theory. The engine optimally controls the transmission of redundant Forward Error Correction packets to combat data loss. Trace-driven emulation demonstrates that Pangolin reduces the 99.9-percentile latency from more than 4 seconds to about 1 second with negligible overhead.
Pangolin pre-computes all optimal actions and requires only simple table look-up during online operation. Pangolin has been incorporated into the latest Xbox SDK - released in November, 2010 - and is now powering concurrent messaging for hundreds of thousands of Xbox clients.
- 1 vs. 100 (Xbox 360). In Wikipedia.Google Scholar
- Zynga -- the world's most intriguing startups. In Businessweek (November 2009).Google Scholar
- The 25 largest facebook games as 2010 begins. In Inside Facebook (January 2010).Google Scholar
- Allman, M., Eddy, W. M., and Ostermann, S. Estimating loss rates with tcp. In ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review (2003). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Allman, M., and Paxson, V. On estimating end-to-end network path properties. In SIGCOMM '99: Proceedings of the conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communication (New York, NY, USA, 1999), ACM, pp. 263--274. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Balakrishnan, M., Birman, K., Phanishayee, A., and Pleisch, S. Ricochet: Lateral error correction for time-critical multicast. In Fourth Usenix Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (2007). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Balakrishnan, M., Marian, T., Birman, K., Weatherspoon, H., and Vollset, E. Maelstrom: Transparent error correction for lambda networks. In Fifth Usenix Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Beutler, F. J., and Ross, K. W. Optimal policies for controlled markov chains with a constraint. In Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Application (1985).Google Scholar
- Bolot, J.-C., Fosse-Parisis, S., and Towsley, D. Adaptive fec-based error control for internet telephony. In IEEE INFOCOM (1999).Google Scholar
- Bolot, J. C., and Vega-Garcia, A. The case for fec-based error control for packet audio in the internet. In ACM Multimedia Systems (1997).Google Scholar
- Byers, J., Luby, M., Mitzenmacher, M., and Rege, A. A digital fountain approach to reliable distribution of bulk data. In Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM (1998). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Byers, J. W., Considine, J., Mitzenmacher, M., and Rost, S. Informed content delivery across adaptive overlay networks. In Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM (2002). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Chang, H., Jamin, S., and Wang, W. Live streaming performance of the zattoo network. In ACM Internet Measurement Conference (2009). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Chou, P. A., and Miao, Z. Rate-distortion optimized streaming of packetized media. In IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (Apr. 2006). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Chou, P. A., Wu, Y., and Jain, K. Practical network coding. In Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing (2003).Google Scholar
- Dukkipati, N., Refice, T., Cheng, Y., Chu, J., Sutin, N., Agarwal, A., Herbert, T., and Jain, A. An argument for increasing tcp's initial congestion window. In ACM Sigcomm CCR (July 2010). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Gkantsidis, C., and Rodriguez, P. Network coding for large scale content distribution. In IEEE INFOCOM (2005).Google Scholar
- Haeberlen, A., Dischinger, M., Gummadi, K. P., and Saroiu, S. Monarch: a tool to emulate transport protocol flowsover the internet at large. In IMC '06: Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement (New York, NY, USA, 2006), ACM, pp. 105--118. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Jiang, H., and Dovrolis, C. Passive estimation of tcp round-trip times. In ACM CCR (2002). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Liew, J. Why the economics of social gaming are so attractive to investors, December 2009.Google Scholar
- Maymounkov, P., and Mazires, D. Rateless codes and big downloads. In The Second International Workshop on Peer-to-peer Systems (2003).Google ScholarCross Ref
- Mondal, A., and Kuzmanovic, A. Removing exponential backoff from tcp. In ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review (2008). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Nonnenmacher, J., Biersack, E., and Towsley, D. Parity-based loss recovery for reliable multicast transmission, 1998.Google Scholar
- Rhee, I., and Joshi, S. R. Fec-based loss recovery for interactive video transmission experimental study. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia Computing and Systems (1998). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Rothschild, J. High performance at massive scale: Lessons learned at facebook. In CNS Lecture Series (2009).Google Scholar
- Rubenstein, D., Kasera, S., Towsley, D., and Kurose, J. Improving reliable multicast using active parity encoding services (apes). In Computer Networks (2004). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Shalunov, S. Low extra delay background transport (ledbat). In IETF Draft (2009).Google Scholar
- Vasudevan, V., Phanishayee, A., Shah, H., Krevat, E., Andersen, D., Ganger, G., Gibson, G., and Mueller, B. Safe and effective fine-grained tcp retransmissions for datacenter communication. In ACM SIGCOMM (2009). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Zhang, C., Huang, C., Chou, P. A., Li, J., Mehrotra, S., Ross, K. W., Chen, H., Livni, F., and Thaler, J. Pangolin: Speeding up Concurrent Messaging for Cloud-Based Social Gaming. In Technical Report, Microsoft Research (June 2011). http://research.microsoft.com/~chengh/techreports/pangolintech.pdf.Google ScholarDigital Library
Recommendations
Pangolin: an SFL-based toolset for feature localization
ASE '19: Proceedings of the 34th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software EngineeringPinpointing the location where a given unit of functionality---or feature---was implemented is a demanding and time-consuming task, yet prevalent in most software maintenance or evolution efforts. To that extent, we present Pangolin, an Eclipse plugin ...
Using Twitter Data to Evaluate Pangolin Conservation Awareness
ACI '23: Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Animal-Computer InteractionPangolins are the most heavily trafficked species in the world. Despite this, they remain relatively unknown compared to other species also at risk from over-exploitation. Public awareness of the species is essential for developing successful ...
TCP CERL: congestion control enhancement over wireless networks
In this paper, we propose and verify a modified version of TCP Reno that we call TCP Congestion Control Enhancement for Random Loss (CERL). We compare the performance of TCP CERL, using simulations conducted in ns-2, to the following other TCP variants: ...
Comments