The near-term feasibility of P2P MMOG's

Broadly deployed distributed virtual environments (DVE's) are based upon client-server architectures. Significant research over the last decade proposes a variety of distributed topologies for message propagation to enhance scalability and performance. We ran simulations using traces from World of Warcraft (WoW) and typical broadband speeds, and found that DVE's such as WoW could not employ P2P message propagation schemes. We found pure P2P pub-sub solutions would occasionally saturate residential broadband connections, and would result in average latency more than lOx greater than client-server solutions. To our surprise, we discovered message aggregation before transmission can not only reduce bandwidth requirements, but also reduce latency in both client-server and P2P message propagation schemes.