An Overview of Networking Infrastructure for Massively Multiplayer Online Games

A massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) is a networked computer or video game in which tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of players may interact with one another in real-time in a shared environment, even though these users may be separated by vast geographic distances. In the last decade the popularity of MMOGs has exploded. Unfortunately, the demand has far outweighed the resources commercial game providers can provide. Many MMOGs are suffering from scalability issues, resulting in game world partitioning, service down time and server crashes. The centralized server architecture of most modern day MMOGs is unable to cope with this increase in the number of participating players. Hence, there is a need for a scalable network architecture which can support these large number of players without affecting the overall gaming experience for each player. In this paper, we provide a review on the existing networking infrastructure solutions for MMOGs. This includes description and comparison of different implementation techniques for the deployment of massive multiplayer on-line games, which work as a client/server and peer-to-peer paradigms.