Applicability of group communication for increased scalability in MMOGs

Massive multiplayer online games (MMOGs) are today the driving factor for the development of distributed interactive applications, and they are increasing in size and complexity. Even a small MMOG supports thousands of players, the biggest support hundreds of thousands of concurrent players. Since they are typically built as strict client-server systems, they suffer from the inherent scalability problem of the architecture. Computing power and bandwidth limitations close to the server limit the possible number of players. Also, the latency of communication between players through the server will be higher than using direct communication. In the paper, we address these issues and investigate improvement options. A typical MMOG consists of a virtual world with a concept of time and space that is similar to the real world. In it, players are represented by avatars. Only subsets of these avatars interact with each other at any given time. This allows us to divide them into groups, and co...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: NETGAMES
• Authors: Knut-Helge Vik, Carsten Griwodz, Pål Halvorsen
• Keywords: Computer Networks, Group Communication, Massive Multiplayer Online Games, MMOG Supports Thousands, NETGAMES 2006