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Using Spacial Locality and Replication to Increase P2P Network Performance in MMO Games

Authors:
Ross Humphrey
Alexander Allan
Giuseppe Di Fatta

Keywords: Peer-to-Peer Networks; Massively Multiplayer Online Games; Interest Management.

Abstract:
Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) are increasing in scale and popularity, which is putting strain on the classical client-server(C/S) architecture. As a consequence there is a growing research interest in the adoption of Peer to Peer (P2P) architectures to spread the load throughout participating client machines. However this presents many challenges, amongst which is creating a shared virtual space between nodes, an area known as Interest Management. When using the Region-Based model of Interest Management the game world is mapped to a logical space which is broken into regions managed by peers. When a player's avatar moves through the game-space it moves through these regions, and must download content from the appropriate peer. Finding this peer can be handled by a look-up on a Distributed Hash Table with a circular key. This work explores the advantage of mapping Distributed Hash Table(DHT) keys using a locality preserving function instead of a conventional uniformity enforcing hash algorithm within a P2P protocol for MMOGs. Content retrieval robustness in terms of handling node failures is also explored with multiple data replication techniques analysed and compared. The performance difference is measured in terms of hop count, node stabilisation and node failure. Results show that using locality sensitive hashing and 12 node replication provided favourable performance across all three measurements used.

Pages: 24 to 29

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2012

Publication date: September 23, 2012

Published in: conference

ISBN: 978-1-61208-238-7

Location: Barcelona, Spain

Dates: from September 23, 2012 to September 28, 2012