Dynamic microcell assignment for massively multiplayer online gaming

Abstract

With the number of players of massively multiplayer online games (MMOG) going beyond the millions, there is a need for an efficient way to manage these huge digital worlds. These virtual environments are dynamic and sudden increases in player density in a part of the world have an impact on the load of the server responsible for that section of the virtual world. In this paper we propose the division of the world into several interacting microcells that can be dynamically assigned to a set of servers. We outline the architecture of such a system and describe a set of algorithms that assign the microcells to the available servers. The maximum load experienced by a server is used as a minimization criterion. The different algorithms are compared with each other and with the standard approach used in these games.