Peer-to-peer support for low-latency Massively Multiplayer Online Games in the cloud

Abstract

Cloud gaming has recently been proposed as an alternative to traditional video game distribution. With this approach, the entire game is stored, run and rendered on a remote server. Player input is forwarded to the server via the Internet and the game's output is returned as a video stream. This adds network delay, which can negatively impact the gameplay. The delay is acceptable as long as the user is located geographically close to the cloud servers. However, for Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), this delay is added on top of the existing delay between MMOG client and server. As MMOGs are highly delay-sensitive, this can significantly degrade their playability. To deal with this issue, we propose to use peer-to-peer techniques to distribute the MMOG server functionality and place it at the cloud server centers. This allows us to reduce the additional delay introduced by running the MMOG clients in the cloud.