A dynamic load sharing algorithm for massively multiplayer online games

Abstract

To support hundreds of thousands of players in massively multiplayer online games, a distributed client-server architecture is widely used in which multiple servers are deployed and each server handles a partition of the virtual world. Because of the unpredictable movements and interactions of avatars, the concentration of avatars in some regions of the virtual world may cause some servers be overloaded. Existing load balancing schemes for distributed virtual environments and multiplayer games try to balance the workload among servers by transferring some workload of an overloaded server to other servers. While load balancing algorithms can minimize the average response time of the system, they may also result in frequent client migrations, which may damage the interactivity of an online game. In this paper, we propose a dynamic load sharing algorithm together with an efficient client migration scheme based on the concept of subscription regions. Simulation study has also been done to verify the effectiveness of our scheme.