Peer-to-Peer-Based Infrastructure Support for Massively Multiplayer Online Games

Multiplayer games played over the Internet have become very popular in the lastfew years. An interesting subcategory are the so-called massively multiplayeronline games (MMOGs) that allow thousands of player characters to share asingle game world. Such a world is usually run on a high-performance and high-availability server cluster. However, even with games that have been extensivelybeta-tested, downtimes of several hours because of hard- or software failures arenot uncommon. Downtimes, especially in the first few weeks after the release,can negatively affect the image of the game and the company that created it.Traditionally, a cluster of servers contains one virtual world of a MMOG.Such infrastructure is inflexible and error-prone. One would rather like to havea system that allows disconnecting a server at runtime while others take overits tasks. Server-based MMOGs can have performance problems if players areconcentrated in certain parts of the game world or some worlds are overpopu-lated. Thus, there is also a need for load balancing mechanisms. Peer-to-Peer(P2P) systems quite naturally support the use of load balancing.In this paper we use a structured P2P technology for the organization of theinfrastructure and thus for the reduction of downtimes in MMOGs. We splitthe game world in disjunctive rectangular zones and distribute them on differentnodes of the P2P network.Online games are an interesting challenge and chance for the future devel-opment of the P2P paradigm. A wide variety of aspects of only theoreticallysolved and especially yet completely unsolved problems are covered by this ap-plication. Security and trust problems appear as well as the need to preventcheating. The application is not as tolerant to faults as instant messaging or filesharing. Consistent data storage is a problem, decisions and transactions haveto be performed in a decentralized way. Moreover, the P2P network is not usedas pure lookup service, but more as a communication and application-specificsocial structure.The rest of this paper is organized as follows: First we discuss related work inSection 2 and give a brief introduction to P2P and MMOGs and their challengesin Section 3. Section 4 shows our approach to use structured P2P Systems forMMOGs and section 5 the evaluation with player traces from a real MMOG.Finally, Section 6 provides conclusions.