A load balancing scheme for massively multiplayer online games

MMOGs are applications which require much network bandwidth to function properly. In a distributed MMOG server architecture, with heterogeneous resources, the server nodes may become easily overloaded by the high demand from the players for state updates. Much work has been done in order to distribute the load on the server nodes, but this load is usually defined as the number of players on each server, what is not an ideal measure. Also, the heterogeneity of the system is frequently overlooked. In this work, we propose a balancing scheme which has two main goals: allocate load on the servers proportionally to the each one’s power and reduce as much as possible the overhead from the distribution, considering the load as the occupied
bandwidth of each server. It is is divided in three phases: local selection of servers, balancing and refinement. Four algorithms were proposed, from which ProGReGA is the best for overhead reduction and ProGReGA-KF is the most suited for reducing player migrations between servers. We also make a review of related works and some comparisons were made.