Massive multi-players games are interesting from a network research point of view as they are sensitive to loss and delay while at same time producing huge amounts of data. Their characteristics are very different from the request/response protocols that currently dominate the Internet. It is perhaps timely to consider the required infrastructure for future games that are one or two orders of magnitude larger than those currently available. Typically, existing large games use a central server model as peer-to-peer systems are assumed to be unscalable. However, central servers cannot scale beyond a certain point owing to I/O limitations. This paper proposes a hybrid solution between the peer-to-peer and central server models that, we claim, is more scalable than either alone.
By: Sean Rooney, Daniel Bauer, and Paolo Scotton
Published in: RZ3441 in 2002
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