Grant: Applied Research and Development Grants - Level 2

GPN-Perf is a two-phase project conducted by Okanagan College and its industrial partner WTFast. The first phase begins in 2014 as an undergoing NSERC CCI ARD Level 1 project. Its main results are (a) the design and implementation of an experimental GPN (Game Private Network) infrastructure to test game server software performance on an "in vitro" laboratory environment, (b) isolation of the effect of server software from network latency and bandwidth, which is not possible in WTFast's industrial setup that connects players with servers over the internet (c) measuring and explaining key statistics of the GPN performance. Okanagan College's goal is to schedule the second phase immediately after completion of the first phase so as to retain student interest, continuous involvement of WTFast and thus reduce the lag between academic R&D and future high-value WTFast services. This project will utilize the infrastructure created in the first phase of the project as the framework on which to test and build game server software that can optimize and monitor WTFast game services in real time. This infrastructure will allow new servers to be automatically deployed and configured for use as private game servers, while also monitoring their performance and usage statistics. By using new innovative predictive models (created by the project), new servers may be automatically added when traffic levels will require more resources to maintain optimal performance. Testing of the network infrastructure and the network software will be done using a program that simulates many players connecting to many game servers on several virtual machines in the network. The goal of these network tests is to identify the point at which the network software can no longer keep up to the flow of traffic. The tests will also serve to identify the capacity of the game servers and their host virtual machines in terms of the number of players they can support. This knowledge and associated experimental functionality exists nowhere else in the industry and will give us deeper knowledge, plus industrial innovation in the game networking area.