Design and Simulation of a Migration-based Architecture for Massively Populated Internet Games

In recent years, many popular interactive computer games have gained online remote multiplayer functionalities, supported by standard Internet communication protocols and architectures. Due to the heterogeneous communication infrastructures and network asymmetries, some users (i.e. clients) may be suffering slow, congested and unreliable Internet connections, while others may have access to fast and reliable links. A different rate and latency in the delivery of users' commands and event notifications may lead to unfairness issues during the game play, specifically, for the class of real time and interactive games. A dynamic adaptation of the gaming architecture to the limitations of the communication infrastructure could be exploited to reduce these problems. In this paper, we present a simple client migration algorithm which can be adopted on a generic multiplayer, multi-server online gaming architecture. Client migration among the servers of the gaming infrastructure is exploited to adapt to the dynamic performances of the general communication network infrastructure. The proposed mechanism has been modeled and simulated for the class of distributed multiplayer and multi-server interactive games, implemented over a general communication network infrastructure. Results show a significant fairness improvement, more homogeneous performances, and the absence of significant overheads.