Gaming over COPSS: A content centric communication infrastructure for gaming applications

Abstract

Supporting Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG) is a significant challenge. MMORPGs have become very popular because of their attractive structuring and incorporation of realistic and creative scenarios. World of Warcraft and Counter-Strike are examples of such games and are characterized by high interactivity (need very low network latency). Every action an individual player performs typically needs to be communicated to all the related players and the players need to react according to the ‘current’ environment and the cumulative actions of all the players. Games like Second Life involve a large number of players and require a persistent view of the world that is usually managed by a dedicated server (e.g., one that is hosted by the game's publisher). The load on such a server for player management and communication can be significant, and is likely to be a source of substantial latency. A problem in designing a MMORPG is that of determining the related players for every action and disseminate these actions and the changed environment to the relevant players in a scalable manner with very low latency. For games where the environment is divided into regions that different groups of players may have varying amounts of visibility, it is desirable to sub-divide the environment into hierarchical regions. We envisage incorporating the notion of a “multi-layer hierarchical map”. While such capabilities exist in some limited form in selected games, such as Second Life (where players share a global map), they may be useful in a wide range of interactive MMORPG. A server-based infrastructure is likely to have more difficulty with providing this capability because of the communication and processing (customized for each individual player) requirements.