Solving key design issues for massively multiplayer online games on peer-to-peer architectures

摘要: Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) are increasing in both popularity and scale on the Internet predominantly implemented by Client/Server architectures. While such a classical approach to distributed system design offers many benefits, it suffers from significant technical commercial drawbacks, primarily reliability scalability costs. This realisation has sparked recent research interest adapting MMOGs Peer-to-Peer (P2P) thesis identifies six key issues be addressed P2P MMOGs, namely management, event dissemination, task sharing, state persistency, cheating mitigation, incentive mechanisms. Design alternatives for each issue systematically compared, their interrelationships discussed. How well representative MMOG architectures fulfil criteria is also evaluated. It argued that although developing rapidly, support sharing mechanisms still need improved. The of novel framework Mediator, presented. employs self-organising super-peer network over overlay infrastructure, addresses an integrated system. Mediator extensible, as supports flexible policy plug-ins can accommodate introduction new superpeer roles. Key components this have been evaluated with simulated MMOG. As relies super-peers computational administrative tasks, membership management crucial, e.g. allow recover failures. A technology this, Membership-Aware Multicast Bushiness Optimisation (MAMBO), designed, reuses communication structure tree-based application-level multicast track group efficiently. Evaluation demonstration application shows