Title: Kernel mechanisms for turning a 3D MMOG from single into multi-server architecture

Authors: Mei-Ling Chiang; Ching-Chung Tseng; Yen-Chu Chang; Shu-Chun Chao; Han Wang

Addresses: Department of Information Management, National Chi-Nan University, Taiwan ' Department of Information Management, National Chi-Nan University, Taiwan ' Department of Information Management, National Chi-Nan University, Taiwan ' Department of Information Management, National Chi-Nan University, Taiwan ' Department of Information Management, National Chi-Nan University, Taiwan

Abstract: A game designed with single-server architecture cannot serve a large number of players at the same time. To increase the service capacity, one needs either to upgrade the server with more powerful equipment or to redesign the game software to enable multi-server processing. Instead of modifying the game software, we experiment on using operating system mechanisms to effectively support 3D massively multiplayer online games in server clusters. The game connection handoff mechanism is implemented for transparently migrating a client's live game connection between servers. Besides, a load distribution policy treats a virtual world as a set of regions and distributes players on them to servers. It adjusts the range of regions for servers when some servers are added into or removed from the cluster. Experiments with a real 3D game show that under some constraints, the original single-server game is turned into one with server cluster architecture. The system capacity is increased.

Keywords: Linux kernel; massively multiplayer online games; MMOGs; server cluster; load balance.

DOI: 10.1504/IJHPCN.2017.086540

International Journal of High Performance Computing and Networking, 2017 Vol.10 No.4/5, pp.359 - 371

Received: 05 Oct 2015
Accepted: 20 Feb 2016
Published online: 12 Sep 2017 *

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