Massive multi-player online games are large distributed applications where thousands of participants exchange data. Existing solutions based on central servers face scalability problems. We study a hybrid solution between the peer-to-peer and central server models that divides a large game into several federated small games. The central component of this architecture is a multicast reflector. We present two efficient software implementations that have been developed as Linux kernel extensions and compare them with our user-space implementation. The comparison is based on performance measurements done on actual implementations.
A condensed version of this paper appeared in the Proceedings of NGC 2003, Munich, Germany, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 2816, pp. 214-225 (Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2003).
By: Daniel Bauer and Sean Rooney
Published in: in 2003
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