Using geometrical routing for overlay networking in MMOGs

At a first glance, transmitting update information to a geographic region in the virtual space seems to be an attractive primitive in Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming (MMOG) applications where players are constantly moving and need to send updates to their neighbors who are in the same region of the virtual space. The system would become more scalable if entities did not need to keep track of each other or send messages directly to one another. Rather, an entity could just send a message to a specific region in the virtual space (its area of effect), as opposed to sending packets to specific IP addresses, significantly reducing tracking and routing overhead. Fundamentally speaking, update message exchange is mostly based on users’ visibility range, which is mainly affected by proximity; i.e., avatars are interested in nodes within a specific distance around them. Therefore MMOG applications require a routing scheme that can deliver messages to specified locations in the virtual space. Such location based routing motivates the use of geographical routing, which has been introduced and successfully used in the context of wireless networks; however, in its current form it is not well suited for MMOGs which run on wired networks. In this article, we propose a scalable MMOG networking architecture based on hierarchical multi-grid geographical routing that is well suited for MMOG networks. We present our concept and design of hierarchical geometrical routing based on locality sensitive hashing, demonstrate its performance, and discuss both the strengths and shortcomings of our approach.