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

Massive Multiplayer Online Games with their virtual gaming worlds grow in user numbers as well as in the size of the virtual worlds. With this growth comes a significant increase of the requirements for server hardware. Today an MMOG provider usually faces the problem of serving thousands of users with entire server clusters. Peer-to-Peer networks with their high scalability and flexibility meet the requirements of connecting hundreds of thousands of people all over the world without a central server. In doing so the network bandwidth requirements remain at a reasonable level. In this work we propose to combine MMOGs with a Peerto-Peer network. We introduce a game architecture capable of exploiting the flexibility and scalability of P2P networks. A P2P architecture based on an overlay network using distributed hash tables with support for persistent object storage and event distribution has been developed to meet MMOG requirements. Keywords MMOG, peer-to-peer, game architecture

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: NETGAMES
• Authors: Thorsten Hampel, Thomas Bopp, Robert Hinn
• Keywords: Computer Networks, Gaming Worlds Grow, Massive Multiplayer Online Games, Mmog, NETGAMES 2006