Managing virtual entities in MMOGs: a Voronoi-based approach

The definition of a distributed architecture for Massively Multiplayer Online Game raises several research challenges. Among these, the problem of managing the virtual entities of the MMOG and of maintaining their persistence is one of the most relevant ones. The management of the entities cannot be simply delegated to the peers, because the load assigned to a single peer may be high. Furthermore, a centralized server is needed to manage the state of the entities when all the peers leave the game. This paper proposes an integrated server/P2P architecture for MMOG and focus on the problem of the assignment of the virtual entities to the server/peers. We propose to define this assignment through a Voronoi Tessellation which is defined by exploiting the position of the peers. Each peer manages the entities located in the intersection of a superset of its Area of Interest and of its Voronoi region, while the entities located outside these areas are assigned to the server. A set of experimental results proving the effectiveness of our approach are presented.