Exploiting Google's Edge Network for Massively Multiplayer Online Games
Jared N. Plumb, Ryan Stutsman · 2018
Massively multiplayer online game servers are challenging to build and maintain; they require always-on availability, low-latency, and high predictability. In many ways, these systems could benefit from pushing application logic to the connected clients. However, historically peer-to-peer networks have not worked when applied to this domain. Pushing game logic to the clients complicates development since client end hosts cannot trust their peers and they have unreliably persistent connections, increasing the possibility of cheating or network failure. Google's Edge Network changes everything we have concluded about peer-to-peer networks over the past decade. Having access to thousands of servers all over the world solves problems of availability, data access, link saturation, security, and control. This new system allows for the inclusion of trusted peers in otherwise untrusted node clusters. Developers can explore peer-to-peer or decentralized algorithms while allowing complete control over their data, code, and players, in their developed virtual worlds. They can offload application game logic to a low-latency scalable system, which provides a cost-effective solution residing closer to the connected clients. In this paper, we investigate the gains game developers may obtain by exploring emerging edge cloud technology. We demonstrate how massively multiplayer online games benefit from this new system though simulation. We compare area-of-interest latency, which is the latency between client interactions within the virtual world for known World of Warcraft and Google data centers locations. We show the benefits to area-of-interest latency gained from using Google's Edge Network, while minimally affecting client to server latency. Finally, we present a novel approach to maximize latency reductions for area-of- interest latency by moving players to optimal peering edge servers, thus reducing distance between clients.