Distributed online game server architecture for traffic reducing

Abstract

The massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) industry is suffering from huge out-going traffic from centralized servers. To accommodate this traffic, game companies claim large bandwidth to Internet Data Centers (IDCs), and several months`` payment for that bandwidth is likely to even exceed the cost for MMOG servers. In this thesis, we show the characteristics of a real MMOG server traffic at first, and propose an MMOG server architecture to reduce outgoing bandwidth consumption from MMOG servers. The proposed architecture distributes some functions of servers to selected clients, and those clients are in charge of event notification to other clients in order to reduce the outgoing traffic from servers. The clients with server functions communicate with each other in peer-to-peer manner. We present a scheme using redundant cell-daemons for unexpected client crash, and related discussions for issues raised by adopting peer-to-peer schemes in MMOG. We analyze traffic reduction as a function of cell-daemonable ratio of clients, and the results show that up to 80% of outgoing traffic from servers can be reduced using the proposed architecture when 10% of clients are cell-daemonable. Simulation results verify analytical observation and show that overheads of incoming and total traffic on network are bound under certain level.