Dynamic Area of Interest Management for Massively Multiplayer Online Games Using OPNET

Abstract

Nowadays, Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) become one of the significant kind of online games. It can support over millions of concurrent players deployed over the world and participating with each other within a single online game. The rapid increase in the number of players for MMOGs has led to some issues with the demand of adding new servers. Resulting in a considerable increase in costs for the game industry and effect to the quality of service offered to users. In order to provide a scalable MMOGs, area of interest management (AoIM) is considered a fundamental ingredient to decrease unnecessary network traffic. In this paper, we have proposed a novel dynamic area of interest management to minimize the end-to-end delay as well as network traffic of MMOGs Hybrid P2P system. We have used OPNET Modeler 18.0, in particular the custom application to simulate the new technique, which required the execution of new nodes models and behaviors in the simulator to emulate correctly the new architecture. The scenarios comprise both MMOGs hybrid P2P and client-server system in order to evaluate the game communication with (125, 500, and 1000) peers. The simulation results show that AoIM of MMOGs based on hybrid P2P architectures produce low delay and low network traffic received compared to MMOGs based on client-server system without AoIM.