A Distributed Architecture for Massively Multiplayer Online Services with Peer-to-Peer Support

This paper deals with Massively Multiplayer Online Services, users of which communicate interactively with one another in real time. At present, this kind of services is generally provided in a Client-Server Model, in which users connect directly with a central server managed by a service provider. However, in this model, since a computational load and a communication load concentrate on the central server, high-performance server machines and high-speed data links are required. In this paper, we propose an architecture for distributing the loads by delegating part of the server’s function to users’ machines, which is based on a Peer-to-Peer Model. When we adopt a Peer-to-Peer Model, we face a security problem. In our research, we let multiple machines of users manage the same data and apply a decision by majority rule. This mechanism adds robustness against halts of users’ machines and data tampering by malicious users to the service.