Peer-to-peer-based infrastructure support for massively multiplayer online games

Online games are an interesting challenge and chance for the future development of the Peer-to-Peer paradigm. Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) are becoming increasingly popular today. However, even high-budget titles like World of Warcraft that have gone through extensive betatesting suffer from downtimes because of hard- and software problems. Our approach is to use structured P2P technology for the server infrastructure of MMOGs to improve their reliability and scalability. Such P2P networks are also able to adapt to the current state of the game and handle uneven distributions of the players in the game world. Another feature of our approach is being able to add supplementary servers at runtime. Our system allows using off-the-shelf PCs as infrastructure peers for participation in different game worlds as needed. Due to the nature of the Economy of Scale the same number of hosts will provide a better service than dedicated servers for each game world.