Estudio e implementación de una arquitectura híbrida cliente-servidor/P2P para MMOGs

Abstract

The video game industry has experienced great growth in the last years, and in particular there has been an upswing in the popularity of multiplayer online games. As a consequence, developers and game publishers require big infrastructures to serve a large number of players. Given this problem, and others explained throughout the memory, an alternative architecture that delegates parts of the service to the players is proposed. With this hybrid architecture, the central server will have the capabilities to delegate instances or regions of the virtual world that it manages, to the machines of the players creating "P2P areas". This way, the intention is to have a scalable system but without giving up the advantages of a centralized architecture. Before doing the proposal, a study of the operation of commercial videogames with totally centralized architectures has been made. This analysis exposed its strengths and weaknesses witch served as inspiration for different aspects of the project. Once the proposal is explained from a theoretical point of view, there is also an implementation in Java. This software emulates the behavior of a game server and includes the components that dissect the service and delegates it to the clients. Moreover, a set of tools to generate a large number of clients has also been implemented so the measures resemble a real scenario. Finally, the platform developed has been installed in laboratory computers to practice different experiments through which the viability and performance of the proposed architecture could be assessed.