TY - GEN
T1 - Pangolin
T2 - 7th ACM International Conference on Emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies, CoNEXT'11
AU - Zhang, Chao
AU - Huang, Cheng
AU - Chou, Philip A.
AU - Li, Jin
AU - Mehrotra, Sanjeev
AU - Ross, Keith W.
AU - Chen, Hao
AU - Livni, Felix
AU - Thaler, Jay
PY - 2011
Y1 - 2011
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84889714392&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84889714392&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/2079296.2079319
DO - 10.1145/2079296.2079319
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84889714392
SN - 9781450310413
T3 - Proceedings of the 7th Conference on Emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies, CoNEXT'11
BT - Proceedings of the 7th Conference on Emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies, CoNEXT'11
Y2 - 6 December 2011 through 9 December 2011
ER -