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

  • Authors:
  • Thorsten Hampel;Thomas Bopp;Robert Hinn

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Paderborn, Paderborn, Germany;University of Paderborn, Paderborn, Germany;University of Paderborn, Paderborn, Germany

  • Venue:
  • NetGames '06 Proceedings of 5th ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Network and system support for games
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

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 Peer-to-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.