Multi-server support for multiplayer online games

Abstract

Virtual Environment (VE), the environment that allows users at different geographical locations to share information and interact via a local network or through the Internet. Nowadays it is becoming more and more popular through out the world especially for entertainment purposes. However when the number of viewers exploring the VE increases, the server will quickly become the bottleneck through serving queries from the clients, which include retrieving and transmitting the requested object models to the clients. By employing parallelism using an array of object servers, an adaptive region partitioning scheme is designed to partition the whole VE into multiple regions. All objects within a region will be managed by one server. Requests from viewers for any object within a region will be served by the server managing that region. This reduces the number of viewers that each server needs to handle. When a viewer is crossing the boundary of two or more regions, all the servers of the relevant regions will be serving requests from the viewer since the viewer may be able to view objects within all these regions. However, when a server is overloaded by a large number of requests due to too many clients access its region concurrently, the managed region will be repartitioned and part of it will be transferred to lightly loaded neighbor servers so as to share the loading among the others.