A Low-Latency Peer-to-Peer Approach for Massively Multiplayer Games

Abstract

This paper focuses on the latency reduction problem in massively multiplayer games (MMGs). As the client-server (CS) architecture in use today in most commercial MMGs applications are exposing its weakness in scalability as the number of players increases, researchers start to consider the peer-to-peer (P2P) model that has inherent high scalability for MMGs. However, existing P2P models generally lead to high latency that significantly detracts from the playing experience. To improve this, we present a novel communication model intended to reduce the latency of network communication on game states. The model, based on DHT protocol, can select the best candidate node to perform server’s role for a game zone. In contrast, existing P2P models designate ’peer servers’ randomly without considering latency effects. The simulation shows that our approach obtains much lower latency than existing P2P models. The performance of our approach is shown to be even better than that of CS models.