A scalable architecture for supporting interactive games on the internet

This paper presents a scalable architecture for supporting large-scale interactive Internet games. In order to support a large number of participants and to divide the workload, the virtual world is divided into partitions. Each partition is then assigned to a server. A client (i.e., a player or a participant) will join a server according to the position of the avatar it controls. Compared to a centralized architecture, this distributed client-server architecture is more scalable. In addition, compared to a fully distributed, peer-to-peer architecture, it also provides a means for detecting cheating in distributed games. Since interactions and accounting information must be forwarded directly to one of the servers for qualification and verification, cheating amongst distributed players of the game will be minimized. To support secured communication for interactions and accounting information as well as to speedup periodic update messages (e.g., position updates), a hybrid communication scheme using both TCP and IP multicast is used between clients and the associated server. The communication among servers is enabled by the Run-Time Infrastructure (RTI) services. The High Level Architecture (HLA) Data Distribution Management (DDM) is employed to limit the amount of communication between the servers. In addition, the Ownership Management (OM) is also employed to implement the need for transferring the avatars between servers. In this paper, the design detail of the architecture will be presented. An experimental interactive Internet game realized using the architecture will be also described in the paper.