HYMS: A hybrid MMOG server architecture

Abstract

The massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) industry is suffering from huge outgoing 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 paper, we propose a 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 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-daemon able.