Peer-to-peer architectures for massively multiplayer online games

Abstract

Scalability, fast response time, and low cost are of utmost importance in designing a successful massively multiplayer online game. The underlying architecture plays an important role in meeting these conditions. Peer-to-peer architectures, due to their distributed and collaborative nature, have low infrastructure costs and can achieve high scalability. They can also achieve fast response times by creating direct connections between players. However, these architectures face many challenges. Distributing a game among peers makes maintaining control over the game more complex. Peer-to-peer architectures also tend to be vulnerable to churn and cheating. Moreover, different genres of games have different requirements that should be met by the underlying architecture, rendering the task of designing a general-purpose architecture harder. Many peer-to-peer gaming solutions have been proposed that utilize a range of techniques while using somewhat different and confusing terminologies. This article presents a comprehensive overview of current peer-to-peer solutions for massively multiplayer games using a uniform terminology.

Topologies for combining the internet of things and serious games

“…A peer-to-peer topology for Massively Multiplayer Online Games suggested by Yahyavi A. and Kemme B., offers greater scalability over client-server architectures, due to a better distributed network load [44]. IoT is expanding rapidly, with continuous developments in low energy sensor devices and data analytics.…”

On synthetic workloads for multiplayer online games: a methodology for generating representative shooter game workloads

“…First, they are specific to a certain architecture. While for client/server architectures there are only a few possible topologies, there is a plethora of architectures for P2P-based MMOGs [18]. Creating an empirical model for each topology is not only laborious, but also also hinders research on new architectures such as hybrid P2P with cloud support.…”

Watchmen: Scalable Cheat-Resistant Support for Distributed Multi-player Online Games

“…In small to medium sized games (e.g., FPS games such as Quake III), players are usually aware of all entities of the game. In large-scale RPGs (e.g., World of Warcraft) decentralization is achieved by dividing the game world into zones (e.g., [14]). A simple peer-to-peer game lets each player send all changes directly to all other players.…”

“…In general, cheating can be roughly divided into three categories: (1) Disruption of information flow covers actions that stop or change the normal pace of information flow (e.g., dropping messages), (2) Invalid updates cover actions that are invalid according to game rules (e.g., too fast moves), repetitions, or spoofing, (3) Unauthorized access includes any action (e.g., sniffing) that enables access to unauthorized information. In Table I, we describe a range of cheating types within each category (for details see [14]). …”