Peer-to-peer support for massively multiplayer games

ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 2007

While multi-player online games are very successful, their fast deployment suffers from their server-based architecture. Indeed, servers both limit the scalability of the games and increase deployment costs. However, they make it easier to control the game (e.g. by preventing cheating and providing support for billing). Peer-to-peer, i.e. transfer of the game functions on each each player's machine, is an attractive communication model for online gaming. We investigate here the challenges of peer-to-peer gaming, hoping that this discussion will generate a broader interest in the research community.

IFIP — The International Federation for Information Processing

This paper deals with Massively Multiplayer Online Services, users of which communicate interactively with one another in real time. At present, this kind of services is generally provided in a Client-Server Model, in which users connect directly with a central server managed by a service provider. However, in this model, since a computational load and a communication load concentrate on the central server, high-performance server machines and high-speed data links are required. In this paper, we propose an architecture for distributing the loads by delegating part of the server's function to users' machines, which is based on a Peer-to-Peer Model. When we adopt a Peer-to-Peer Model, we face a security problem. In our research, we let multiple machines of users manage the same data and apply a decision by majority rule. This mechanism adds robustness against halts of users' machines and data tampering by malicious users to the service.

Peer-to-Peer Networking and Applications, 2013

Cloud computing has recently become an attractive solution for massively multiplayer online games, also known as MMOGs, as it lifts operators from the burden of buying and maintaining large amount of computational, storage and communication resources, while offering the illusion of infinite scalability. Yet, cloud resources do not come for free: a careful orchestration is needed to minimize the economical cost. This paper proposes a novel architecture for MMOGs that combines an elastic cloud infrastructure with user-provided resources, to boost both the scalability and the economical sustainability provided by cloud computing. Our system dynamically reconfigures the platform while managing the trade-off between economical cost and quality of service, exploiting user-provided resources whenever possible. Simulation results show that a negligible reduction in the quality of service can reduce the cost of the platform up to 60% percent.

2015

MMOGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games) are getting ever more popular, but current game server architectures do not scale with the number of players. Instead of addressing the issue, the most common workaround in the industry is to use multiple distinct and non communicating game servers. After a brief overview of existing game server architectures and methods to distribute server load, this position paper outlines another kind of architecture that should scale and discusses the difficulty of evaluating game platforms on a large scale.

2008 5th IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference, 2008

State management is a basic requirement for multiuser virtual environments (VEs) such as Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs). Current MMOGs rely on centralized server-clusters that possess inherent scalability bottlenecks and are expensive to adopt and deploy. In this paper, we propose Voronoi State Management (VSM) to maintain object states for peer-to-peer-based virtual worlds. By dynamically partitioning the VE with Voronoi diagrams and aggregating game states of overloaded nodes onto superpeers, VSM supports existing consistency control to enable scalable, load balanced, and fault tolerant VE state management. As both client and server-side resources are utilized collaboratively, VSM also integrates both client-server and peer-to-peer VE designs in a unified approach.

2007 15th IEEE International Conference on Networks, 2007

Scribe is a scalable application level multicast infrastructure. We have developed two techniques to improve the performance of Scribe in terms of latency and bandwidth distribution. The first technique identifies that the final hop of Scribe traffic path is largely selected without any proximity consideration and incurs the longest distance traveled. To overcome this, we introduce Proximity Neighbor Selection (PNS) into the final hop for latency improvement. The second technique builds a hierarchical two-level overlay. While PNS can be applied at both levels for latency performance, the bandwidth stress required by applications can now be distributed among the nodes in the higher level overlay. Our simulation using GT-ITM topology has shown that both techniques have improved the latency performance for more than 30 percent, and the two-level overlay has improved the bandwidth distribution up to 2.7 times, comparing with what can be achieved by a standard Scribe overlay. We have developed the techniques in the context of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs). While Scribe provides a possible platform for the scalable deployment of MMOGs, game developers may leverage the techniques to enhance the design of real-time interactions between players in the game world.

IEEE Software, 2000

2016

More than a million gamers play MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) daily. But most of them use Client Server Architecture. The idea of Peer-to-Peer architecture design doesn’t board well for a MMORPG, so the main focus of this paper is to understand the working of Client-Server architecture for a MMORPG and create a design of a Peer-to-Peer architecture that can be implemented in a MMORPG without compromising many features which are provided by the Client Server architecture. This paper also focuses to identify and solve various problems that a Peer-to-Peer architecture can cause in a MMORPG such as cheating, network splitting during a game session and stable connection during a session.

2015

This article presents an architecture model developed on a Peer to Peer network, which gives support to develop multiplayer games that need to manage their peers connections and permissions. The model enables the development of multiplayer games, without the need of a dedicated server, as is observed in the most architectures. For this, the model offers a library that enables programmers access the network addresses, allowing them manage their peer connections and permissions. As results, of using this architecture model, we can be cite the reduction of the costs for developers of multiplayer games due to no need a dedicated server, and a greater flexibility to manage the peer connections and permissions by the use of the available library of the model. Keywords-manageable network; peer to peer; network address translator; transversal problem.

International Journal of Networked and Distributed Computing, 2015

This paper studies the load balancing problem in distributed systems designed for massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). More concretely, we consider a distributed system of masterworker type in which each worker is associated with a particular region in the game field, and propose a scheme to balance the load of workers as much as possible. The basic idea of the proposed scheme is to dynamically adjust the number of workers associated with each region according to the number of players in the region. The performance of the scheme is evaluated by simulation. The simulation results indicate that it reduces the response time of a previous scheme proposed by Yu et al. by about 50%, which varies depending on the mobility pattern of the players.