Latency reduction by dynamic core selection and partial migration of game state

  • Authors:

  • Paul B. Beskow;Knut-Helge Vik;Pål Halvorsen;Carsten Griwodz

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Oslo, Norway;University of Oslo, Norway;University of Oslo, Norway;University of Oslo, Norway

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Network and System Support for Games
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Massively multi-player online games (MMOGs) require low latency while supporting a large number of concurrent players, often sharing one worldwide instance of the game. As these are conflicting requirements, a common way of distributing load is by dividing the virtual environment into virtual regions. As MMOGs are world-spanning games, it is plausible to disperse these regions on geographically distributed servers. As such, we propose the use of core selection for finding an optimal server for placing a region, and support for migrating the game state to that server. The first goal relies on a set of servers and measurement of the interacting players latencies. In locating an optimal server, we anticipate a decrease in the overall latency for the majority of players. This reduction occurs by migrating the region to a server closer in proximity to the majority of players in that virtual region, thereby lowering the response time of any interaction.