Multimedia Traffic Load Distribution in Massively Multiplayer Online Games

Most Massively Multiplayer Online Games use client-server architecture and thereby bottlenecks in a single server have been a hot issue. One feasible option for the streaming scenario is to consider the federated peer-to-peer model, where multiple reflectors are put between clients to deliver packets. In this paper, we find that although the reflectors may handle multimedia stream to a certain degree, they often become bottlenecks, particularly when client distribution is skewed. To solve the reflector bandwidth bottleneck problem of the federated peer-to-peer model, we propose a traffic distribution model, and then show that the proposed scheme successfully reduces the peak traffic of an overloaded reflector to less than twice the average traffic size. To evaluate the efficiency of the proposed scheme, we also measured the duration of the distribution process and the additional load of the peak, which is caused at the initial buffering process just before the distribution.