Enhancing the multicast performance of structured P2P overlay in supporting Massively Multiplayer Online Games

Abstract

Scribe is a scalable application level multicast infrastructure. We have developed two techniques to improve the performance of Scribe in terms of latency and bandwidth distribution. The first technique identifies that the final hop of Scribe traffic path is largely selected without any proximity consideration and incurs the longest distance traveled. To overcome this, we introduce Proximity Neighbor Selection (PNS) into the final hop for latency improvement. The second technique builds a hierarchical two-level overlay. While PNS can be applied at both levels for latency performance, the bandwidth stress required by applications can now be distributed among the nodes in the higher level overlay. Our simulation using GT-ITM topology has shown that both techniques have improved the latency performance for more than 30 percent, and the two-level overlay has improved the bandwidth distribution up to 2.7 times, comparing with what can be achieved by a standard Scribe overlay. We have developed the techniques in the context of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs). While Scribe provides a possible platform for the scalable deployment of MMOGs, game developers may leverage the techniques to enhance the design of real-time interactions between players in the game world.