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http://dx.doi.org/10.7236/JIIBC.2018.18.4.123

Bandwidth Requirement of Region-based Hybrid Architectures for Massively Multiplayer Online Games  

Kim, Jin-Hwan (Dept. of Multimedia Engineering, Hansung University)
Publication Information
The Journal of the Institute of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication / v.18, no.4, 2018 , pp. 123-130 More about this Journal
Abstract
Many massively multiplayer online games(MMOG) use client-server architectures that have enormous server-side bandwidth requirements. In this paper, we propose a region-based hybrid game architecture that combines the advantages of client-server and peer-to-peer architectures, so that only critical events changing game state are processed by the server. In this hybrid architecture, the central server divides the game into regions and assigns a player as a regional server to distribute important updates for that region. Thus, the central server sends state updates to the players through the regional servers. All players in the same region directly exchange updates without affecting game state. This division of labor greatly reduces server bandwidth significantly and enables it to serve larger number of concurrent players. Our experiments show that the region-based hybrid architecture with three-level hierarchy scales better than the client-server architecture, saving considerable bandwidth at the central server while requiring enough bandwidth of players acting as regional servers.
Keywords
massively multiplayer; hybrid architecture; region-based; bandwidth; game state;
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Times Cited By KSCI : 1  (Citation Analysis)
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