In this paper we propose a fully distributed peer-to-peer (P2P) infrastructure supporting Networked Virtual Environment (NVE) applications, such as massively multiplayer online games (MMOG). While many attempts have been made to tackle one of the most challenging issues in MMOGs - interest management, none of them are considered truly successful. Our architecture is a hybrid scheme focusing on NVEs' interest management. Our scheme takes the advantage of both structured overlay, i.e. Distributed Hash Table (DHT), and the unstructured P2P architecture. It not only has more stable and consistent performance with respect to neighbor discovery, but also is more scalable and fault tolerant than the existing approaches. Unlike other hexagonal zoning approaches in which each participant has a discrete view of the virtual world, our zoning design guarantees that all participants have a continuous view. Moreover, our novel hierarchical architecture and the message dissemination algorithm greatly save network bandwidth and alleviate each node's workload. We implemented our infrastructure running on top of an emulated network. We also implemented a simple game simulation and a visualization tool to demonstrate and visualize our infrastructure.
['Anthony J. Yu', 'Son T. Vuong']
MOPAR: a mobile peer-to-peer overlay architecture for interest management of massively multiplayer online games