Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Distributing Network Game Servers For Improved Geographical Scalability, Paul A. Boustead, Farzad Safaei, Jeremy Brun

Paul Boustead

World-wide multiplayer games present several scalability challenges for large-scale deployment. In recent years, significant research has been devoted to scaling in terms of number of players so that the same virtual world can accommodate larger number of simultaneous avatars. A possible solution is to use grid computing techniques for distribution of processing over a cluster or a distributed set of servers. Scalability with respect to geographical distribution of players is another challenge. Large geographical distances between players introduces propagation delays which are impossible to avoid. Without proper design, responsiveness of the application to user inputs is degraded even when there …