Load Balancing of Peer-to-Peer MMORPG Systems with Hierarchical Area-of-Interest Management

This paper studies the load balancing problem in distributed systems designed for massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). More concretely, we consider a distributed system of master-worker type in which each worker is associated with a particular region in the game field, and propose a scheme to balance the load of workers as much as possible. The basic idea of the proposed scheme is to dynamically adjust the number of workers associated with each region according to the number of players in the region. The performance of the scheme is evaluated by simulation. The simulation results indicate that it reduces the response time of a previous scheme proposed by Yu et al. by about 50%, which varies depending on the mobility pattern of the players.