A peer-to-peer architecture for massive multiplayer online games

Hampel, Thorsten; Bopp, Thomas; Hinn, Robert

doi:10.1145/1230040.1230058

Cited by 77 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…Different alternatives have been presented that are applied in the network layer [5,8] or the application layer [9]. (b) Ensuring data persistence in the game world map [19]. (c) Management of the cheating problem among the peers [27,31].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Distributing game instances in a hybrid client-server/P2P system to support MMORPG playability

Barri

Roig

Giné

2014

Multimed Tools Appl

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MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) is the most popular genre among network gamers, and now attract millions of users, who play simultaneously in an evolving virtual world. This huge number of concurrent players requires the availability of high performance computation servers. Additionally, gaming aware distribution mechanisms are needed to distribute game instances among servers to avoid load imbalances that affect performance negatively. In this work, we tackle the problem of game distribution and scalability by means of a hybrid Client-Server/P2P architecture that can scale dynamically according to the demand. To manage peak loads that occur during the game, we distribute game computation across the system according to the behavior of MMORPGs. We distinguish between the computation associated with the Main Game, that affects all players, and the computation of Auxiliary Games that affects only a few players and acts in isolation from the execution of the Main Game. Taking this distinction into account, we propose a mechanism that is focused in the distribution of Auxiliary Games, as an entity, across the pool of servers and peers of the underlying hybrid architecture. We evaluate the performance of the balancing mechanism taking the criteria of latency and reliability into account, and we compare the effectiveness of the mechanism with a classic approach that applies load balancing to individually players in a Client-Server system. We show that the balancing mechanism based on the latency criteria provides lower latency Appl (2016Appl ( ) 75:2005Appl ( -2029 than the classical proposal, while in relation to reliability, we obtain a failure probability of under 0.9 % in the worst case, which is amply compensated by the scalability provided by the use of the P2P area.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Distributing game instances in a hybrid client-server/P2P system to support MMORPG playability

Barri

Roig

Giné

2014

Multimed Tools Appl

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“…For example, Bayeux (Zhuang et al, 2001) uses Tapestry , CAN Multicast (Ratnasamy et al, 2001b) uses CAN (Ratnasamy et al, 2001a), and both Borg (Zhang and Hu, 2003) and Scribe (Castro et al, 2002) use Pastry (Rowstron and Druschel, 2001a). Currently, some related work directly disseminates gaming events with a general-purpose ALM system, e.g., Lu et al (2004), Hampel et al (2006), Dickey et al (2004) and Iimura et al (2004), which use Scribe. However, others like Yamamoto et al (2005), Rooney et al (2005), Chen and Kalogeraki (2005) and Léty et al (2004) have proposed their own group member management and multicast tree construction algorithms, which aim at providing better robustness, scalability and load-balancing capabilities.…”

Section: Unicast Vs Multicastmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…At such scales, a C/S architecture exhibits various technical and commercial drawbacks, specifically in the area of reliability and cost, e.g., costs for server hardware, network bandwidth, housing, cooling, UPS systems and dedicated maintenance staff. These factors have engendered strong research interest in engineering P2P MMOGs Hampel et al, 2006;Douglas et al, 2005).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Design issues for Peer-to-Peer Massively Multiplayer Online Games

Lü

Trinder

Taylor

2010

IJAMC

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Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) are increasing in both popularity and scale, and while classical Client/Server (C/S) architectures convey some benefits, they suffer from significant technical and commercial drawbacks. This realisation has sparked intensive research interest in adapting MMOGs to Peer-to-Peer (P2P) architectures. This paper articulates a comprehensive set of six design issues to be addressed by P2P MMOGs, namely Interest Management (IM), game event dissemination, Non-Player Character (NPC) host allocation, game state persistency, cheating mitigation and incentive mechanisms. Design alternatives for each issue are systematically compared, and their interrelationships discussed. We further evaluate how well representative P2P MMOG architectures fulfil the design criteria.

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“…When an update is Calculating κ vectors is straightforward (see Fig. 6b, lines [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18]. The function (c, o) → Z, C, P retrieves the φ settings referring to o for each client view s: Z, C, and P .…”

Section: Consistency Management Blockmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…P2P support for multiplayer games is an active research topic [5,12,18]. In these systems, clients exchange updates directly, instead of doing so through a server.…”

Section: Locality-awareness In Multiplayer Games and Simulation Envirmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unifying divergence bounding and locality awareness in replicated systems with vector-field consistency

Veiga

Negrão

Santos

et al. 2010

J Internet Serv Appl

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Data replication is a very relevant technique for improving performance, availability, and scalability. These are requirements of many applications such as multiplayer distributed games, cooperative software tools, etc. However, consistency of the replicated shared state is hard to ensure. Current consistency models and middleware systems lack the required adaptability and efficiency. Thus, developing such robust applications is still a daunting task.We propose a new consistency model, named VectorField Consistency (VFC) that unifies (i) several forms of consistency enforcement and a multidimensional criteria (time, sequence, and value) to limit replica divergence with (ii) techniques based on locality-awareness (w.r.t. players position).Based on the VFC model, we propose a generic metaarchitecture that can be easily instantiated both to centralized and (dynamically) partitioned architectures: (i) a single central server in which the VFC algorithm runs or (ii) a set of servers in which each one is responsible for a slice of the data being shared. The first approach is clearly more adapted to ad hoc networks of resource-constrained devices, while the second, being more scalable, is well adapted to large-scale networks. We developed and evaluated two prototypes of VFC (for ad hoc and large-scale networks) with very good performance results.

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A peer-to-peer architecture for massive multiplayer online games

Cited by 77 publications

References 6 publications

Distributing game instances in a hybrid client-server/P2P system to support MMORPG playability

Distributing game instances in a hybrid client-server/P2P system to support MMORPG playability

Design issues for Peer-to-Peer Massively Multiplayer Online Games

Unifying divergence bounding and locality awareness in replicated systems with vector-field consistency

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