A Peer-to-Peer Massive Battle Observing System to Support Game Live

Abstract

Gaming services are attractive for Internet users. How to broadcast live gaming services to large-scale Internet users is still a big problem. Traditional schemes, based on Peer-to-Peer (P2P) live-streaming and based on TV shows, have poor user experiences (good graphic quality with high resolution) and need big bandwidth or TV set support. In order to avoid network congestion, a small number of solutions propose an alternative approach based on game data content instead of video content to provide game live services. At present, all of them who use client/server framework do not emphasize the design of system architecture, so the number of users is constrained and the system is hard to expand. In this paper, we introduce PKTV, a P2P game battle observing system, which is now optimized specially for War craft 3. PKTV system broadcasts game data content to reduce bandwidth overhead, maintains a P2P overlay for each gaming channel and uses a reliable UDP protocol to break the limitation of the TCP connections, decentralizes servers to enhance system's availability and scalability. Furthermore, tests and simulations show that PKTV also have robust functionality and good performance: low-latency, low bandwidth consumption and very considerable bandwidth savings for servers.