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A load balancing scheme for massively multiplayer online games

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Abstract

In a distributed MMOG (massively multiplayer online game) server architecture, the server nodes may become easily overloaded by the high demand from the players for state updates. Many works propose algorithms to distribute the load on the server nodes, but this load is usually defined as the number of players on each server, what is not an ideal measure. Also, the possible heterogeneity of the system is frequently overlooked. We propose a balancing scheme with two main goals: allocate load on server nodes proportionally to each one’s power and reduce the inter-server communication overhead, considering the load as the occupied bandwidth of each server. Four algorithms were proposed, from which ProGReGA is the best for overhead reduction and ProGReGA-KF is the most suited for reducing player migrations between servers. We also make a review of related works and some comparisons were made, where our approach performed better.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Research Council (CNPq) and by the Coordination of Improvement of Higher Education (CAPES), both Brazilian research funding agencies.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Av. Bento Gonçalves, 9500, Porto Alegre, Brazil

    Carlos Eduardo Benevides Bezerra & Cláudio Fernando Resin Geyer

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  1. Carlos Eduardo Benevides Bezerra
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  2. Cláudio Fernando Resin Geyer
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Correspondence to Carlos Eduardo Benevides Bezerra.

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Bezerra, C.E.B., Geyer, C.F.R. A load balancing scheme for massively multiplayer online games. Multimed Tools Appl 45, 263–289 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-009-0302-z

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