Distributed Scalable Multi-player Online Game Servers on Peer-to-Peer Networks
Bibliographic Information
- Other Title
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- P2Pアプリケーション
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Abstract
Today's Multi-player Online Games (MOGs) are challenged by infrastructure requirements because of their server-centric nature. Peer-to-peer overlay networks are an interesting alternative if they can implement the set of functions that are traditionally performed by centric game servers. In this paper we propose a Zoned Federation Model (ZFM) to adapt MOGs to peer-to-peer overlay networks. We also introduce the concept of zone and zone owner to MOGs. A zone is some part of the whole game world and a zone owner is a game sever of a specific zone. According to the demands of the game program each node actively changes its role to a zone owner. By dividing the whole game world into several zones workloads of the centric game server can be distributed to a federation of zones. In order to reduce response latency overhead on data exchanges between a zone owner and its clients we limit the use of a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) to the rendezvous point of each zone; actual data exchanges are carried out through direct TCP connection between a zone owner and its members. We also use the DHT as backup storage media to cope with the resignation of a zone owner. We have implemented this zoned federation model as a middle layer between the game program and the DHT and we evaluate our implementation with a prototypical multi-player game. Evaluation results indicate that our approach enables game creators to design scalable MOGs on the peer-to-peer environment with a short response latency which is acceptable for MOGs.
Today's Multi-player Online Games (MOGs) are challenged by infrastructure requirements because of their server-centric nature. Peer-to-peer overlay networks are an interesting alternative if they can implement the set of functions that are traditionally performed by centric game servers. In this paper, we propose a Zoned Federation Model (ZFM) to adapt MOGs to peer-to-peer overlay networks. We also introduce the concept of zone and zone owner to MOGs. A zone is some part of the whole game world, and a zone owner is a game sever of a specific zone. According to the demands of the game program, each node actively changes its role to a zone owner. By dividing the whole game world into several zones, workloads of the centric game server can be distributed to a federation of zones. In order to reduce response latency overhead on data exchanges between a zone owner and its clients, we limit the use of a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) to the rendezvous point of each zone; actual data exchanges are carried out through direct TCP connection between a zone owner and its members. We also use the DHT as backup storage media to cope with the resignation of a zone owner. We have implemented this zoned federation model as a middle layer between the game program and the DHT, and we evaluate our implementation with a prototypical multi-player game. Evaluation results indicate that our approach enables game creators to design scalable MOGs on the peer-to-peer environment with a short response latency which is acceptable for MOGs.
Journal
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- 情報処理学会論文誌
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情報処理学会論文誌 46 (2), 376-391, 2005-02-15
東京 : 情報処理学会
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Details 詳細情報について
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- CRID
- 1050282812859399552
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- NII Article ID
- 110002768545
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- NII Book ID
- AN00116647
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- ISSN
- 18827764
- 03875806
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- NDL BIB ID
- 7248814
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- Text Lang
- en
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- Article Type
- journal article
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- Data Source
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- IRDB
- NDL
- CiNii Articles