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http://dx.doi.org/10.7236/JIIBC.2013.13.4.29

Reduction Method of Network Bandwidth Requirement for the Scalability of Multiplayer Game Server Systems  

Kim, Jinhwan (Dept. of Multimedia Engineering, Hansung University)
Publication Information
The Journal of the Institute of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication / v.13, no.4, 2013 , pp. 29-37 More about this Journal
Abstract
Multiplayer games typically organized based on a client-server(CS) or peer-to-peer(PP) architecture. The CS architecture is not scalable with the number of players due to a large bandwidth requirement at the server. The PP architecture, on the other hand, introduces significant overhead for the players, as each player needs to check the consistency between its local state and the state of all other players. We then propose a method that combines the merits of CS and PP. In this method, players exchange updates with lower priority in a peer-to-peer manner but communicate directly with a central server for the other updates. As a result, the proposed method has a lower network bandwidth requirement than the server of a CS architecture and the server bandwidth bottleneck is removed. For another important issue about multiplayer games, this method always maintains state consistency among players correctly. The performance of this method is evaluated through extensive simulation experiments and analysis.
Keywords
Client-server; Peer-to-peer; Bandwidth; Multiplayer; Consistency; Scalability;
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