Load-balancing for peer-to-peer networked virtual environment

The trend of games is online games. Most MMORPGs (Massive Multi-user Online Role Playing Games) we can see today are based on client-server architecture. This causes some disadvantages as follows: the server is very expensive and the failure of the server fails the whole game. Besides, the vendor of a game need to provide several servers to allow more players playing at the same time, but players connect to different servers are in the different virtual environments. This paper provides a peer-to-peer architecture with dynamic status information distribution (DSID) mechanism for MMORPG to address the issues occurred in the client-server architecture. We hope to construct a low-cost and flexible architecture that allows all players to interact to each other in the same virtual environment.

[1]  Honghui Lu,et al.  Peer-to-peer support for massively multiplayer games , 2004, IEEE INFOCOM 2004.

[2]  Srinivasan Seshan,et al.  Mercury: a scalable publish-subscribe system for internet games , 2002, NetGames '02.

[3]  Dongman Lee,et al.  A scalable dynamic load distribution scheme for multi-server distributed virtual environment systems with highly-skewed user distribution , 2003, VRST '03.

[4]  Keiichi Yasumoto,et al.  A distributed event delivery method with load balancing for MMORPG , 2005, NetGames '05.

[5]  Jörg Widmer,et al.  A generic proxy system for networked computer games , 2002, NetGames '02.

[6]  Azzedine Boukerche,et al.  A Hybrid Solution to Support Multiuser 3D Virtual Simulation Environments in Peer-to-Peer Networks , 2004, Eighth IEEE International Symposium on Distributed Simulation and Real-Time Applications.

[7]  Hiroaki Hazeyama,et al.  Zoned federation of game servers: a peer-to-peer approach to scalable multi-player online games , 2004, NetGames '04.

[8]  John C. S. Lui,et al.  An Efficient Partitioning Algorithm for Distributed Virtual Environment Systems , 2002, IEEE Trans. Parallel Distributed Syst..

[9]  Rynson W. H. Lau,et al.  A performance study on multi-server DVE systems , 2003, Inf. Sci..

[10]  Shun-Yun Hu,et al.  Scalable peer-to-peer networked virtual environment , 2004, NetGames '04.

[11]  Sergio Caltagirone,et al.  Architecture for a massively multiplayer online role playing game engine , 2002 .

[12]  Don Brutzman,et al.  Requirements for large-scale networked virtual environments , 2003, Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Telecommunications, 2003. ConTEL 2003..

[13]  Constantinos Dovrolis,et al.  Bandwidth requirement and state consistency in three multiplayer game architectures , 2003, NetGames '03.

[14]  Tristan Henderson,et al.  Latency and User Behaviour on a Multiplayer Game Server , 2001, Networked Group Communication.

[15]  Cho-Li Wang,et al.  An architecture to support scalable distributed virtual environment systems on grid , 2006, The Journal of Supercomputing.