A Distributed Routing Architecture for Massively Multi-User Online Games

Massively multi-user online games (MMOGs) incorporate computer graphics and sound to simulate the experience of realtime interaction among multiple users in a shared threedimensional virtual world. These applications therefore deal with the distribution of updates among their users to provide them with a common sense of time and place while interacting in the virtual environment. As MMOGs grow larger in terms of size and numbers of users, they tend to rely on P2P architecture as a scalable way of exchanging the huge bulk of updates among their users without the need for the exponential increase in their central servers. This paper introduces a new distributed architecture for message exchange in MMOGs applications. We propose the use of Hilbert space filling curve, due to its good locality preserving characteristics, as a mechanism for indexing users’ three dimensional locations to a single dimension. We also propose our novel routing strategy based on this architecture, which is executed among the points that are mapped over the Hilbert curve.