Hybrid load balancing for online games

As massively multiplayer online games are becoming very popular, how to support a large number of concurrent users while maintaining the game performance has become an important research topic. There are two main research directions based on the multi-server architecture, global load balancing, which is optimal but computationally expensive, or local load balancing, which is not optimal but efficient. In this paper, we propose a hybrid load balancing approach to support massively multiplayer online gaming. Our idea is to augment a local load balancing algorithm with some global load information, which may be obtained less frequently. We propose two methods to implement the hybrid approach. Our results show that the proposed methods reduce the frequency of server overloading and improve the overall game performance significantly.