Dimensioning server access bandwidth and multicast routing in overlay networks
NOSSDAV '01 Proceedings of the 11th international workshop on Network and operating systems support for digital audio and video
The boost graph library: user guide and reference manual
The boost graph library: user guide and reference manual
On the impact of delay on real-time multiplayer games
NOSSDAV '02 Proceedings of the 12th international workshop on Network and operating systems support for digital audio and video
A generic proxy system for networked computer games
NetGames '02 Proceedings of the 1st workshop on Network and system support for games
Network infrastructure for massively distributed games
NetGames '02 Proceedings of the 1st workshop on Network and system support for games
Provisioning on-line games: a traffic analysis of a busy counter-strike server
Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Internet measurment
The Narada Event Brokering System: Overview and Extensions
PDPTA '02 Proceedings of the International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Processing Techniques and Applications - Volume 1
On the Implementation of MST-Based Heuristics for the Steiner Problem in Graphs
ALENEX '02 Revised Papers from the 4th International Workshop on Algorithm Engineering and Experiments
BRITE: Universal Topology Generation from a User''s Perspective
BRITE: Universal Topology Generation from a User''s Perspective
On realistic network topologies for simulation
MoMeTools '03 Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Models, methods and tools for reproducible network research
The effect of latency on user performance in Warcraft III
NetGames '03 Proceedings of the 2nd workshop on Network and system support for games
Priority-based distribution trees for application-level multicast
NetGames '03 Proceedings of the 2nd workshop on Network and system support for games
Lightweight QoS-support for networked mobile gaming
Proceedings of 3rd ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Network and system support for games
Zoned federation of game servers: a peer-to-peer approach to scalable multi-player online games
Proceedings of 3rd ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Network and system support for games
Scalable peer-to-peer networked virtual environment
Proceedings of 3rd ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Network and system support for games
Game traffic analysis: an MMORPG perspective
NOSSDAV '05 Proceedings of the international workshop on Network and operating systems support for digital audio and video
Game state and event distribution using proxy technology and application layer multicast
Proceedings of the 13th annual ACM international conference on Multimedia
A distributed event delivery method with load balancing for MMORPG
NetGames '05 Proceedings of 4th ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Network and system support for games
The effect of latency on user performance in real-time strategy games
Computer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking - Special issue: Networking issues in entertainment computing
Measurement-based characterization of a collection of on-line games
IMC '05 Proceedings of the 5th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet Measurement
ALMI: an application level multicast infrastructure
USITS'01 Proceedings of the 3rd conference on USENIX Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems - Volume 3
The fun of using TCP for an MMORPG
Proceedings of the 2006 international workshop on Network and operating systems support for digital audio and video
Algorithm Design: Foundations, Analysis and Internet Examples
Algorithm Design: Foundations, Analysis and Internet Examples
Research note: Source models of network game traffic
Computer Communications
Evaluating Steiner-tree heuristics and diameter variations for application layer multicast
Computer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking
Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Simulation tools and techniques for communications, networks and systems & workshops
Avatar mobility in user-created networked virtual worlds: measurements, analysis, and implications
Multimedia Tools and Applications
Magnet: practical subscription clustering for Internet-scale publish/subscribe
Proceedings of the Fourth ACM International Conference on Distributed Event-Based Systems
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
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 communication among group members becomes a multi-party communication problem. Thus, to reduce resource consumption, we compare the performance of several algorithms for group communication with the current central server approach. We use overlay multicast as the means of providing group communication, and research algorithms for creating shortest path trees, spanning trees, delay-bounded spanning trees and, more specific, applying Steiner tree heuristics. Our experimental results indicate that different approaches are useful to reduce resource consumption while achieving a good perceived quality under varying conditions, such as frequent changes in group membership and the demand for low latency.