Wireless Pers Commun (2013) 73:289297

DOI 10.1007/s11277-013-1237-2

An Efficient Gaming User Oriented Load Balancing

Scheme for MMORPGs
Hye-Young Kim Hwa-Jin Park

Published online: 4 July 2013

Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013

Abstract Massively multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPGs) follows a clientserver model that has the numerous gaming users with many interactions at the same virtual
world, massive loading that result in delays, resource shortages, and other such problems
occur. Also, faced with high resource demand variability and with misfit resource renting
policies, the current practices is to overprovision for each game tens of owned data. Existing
load balancing schemes for distributed virtual environments and multiplayer games try to
balance the workload among servers by transferring some workload of an overloaded server
to other servers. While load balancing algorithms can minimize the average response time
of the system, they may also result in frequent client migrations, which may damage the
interactivity of an online games. To solve this, many developers devote research to loadbalancing servers, yet due to steady and dynamic map divisions, such research is unreliable.
Many developers propose algorithms to distribute the load on the server nodes, but the load
is usually defined as the number of players on each server, what is not an ideal results. So, we
propose a gaming user-oriented load balancing scheme for the load balancing of MMORPGs
servers in this paper. This scheme shows effectiveness at dealing with hot-spots and other
gatherings of gaming users at specific servers compared to previous methods.
Keywords

MMORPGs Load balancing User oriented Seamless Gaming user

H.-Y. Kim
School of Game/Game Software, Hongik University,
Building B, Room #211, 2639 Sejong-ro,
Jochiwon-eup, Chungcheongnam-do 339-701, Republic of Korea
e-mail: hykim@hongik.ac.kr
H.-J. Park (B)
Department of Multimedia Science, Sookmyung Womens University,
Hyochangwongil 52, Yongsan-gu, Seoul 140-742, Republic of Korea
e-mail: phj2000@sm.ac.kr

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1 Introduction
A Massively multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPGs) is immensely popular with
several commercial games reporting millions of subscribes. Most of them require huge virtual
worlds, significant hardware requirements, and dedicated support staffs [1,2]. The main
characteristic of MMORPGs is the large number of players, having dozens, or even hundreds,
of thousands of participants simultaneously. This large number of players interesting with
one another generates traffic on the support network which may grow quadratic compared to
the number of players in the worst case [3].
A single computer is limited at around 500 simultaneous and persistent network connections, and database can manage the update of around 500 objects per second [4]. To support
at the same time millions of active concurrent players and many more other game entities,
MMOG (Massively Multi-player Online Game) operators need to install and operate a large
dedicated multi-server infrastructure [5], with hundreds to thousands of computers hosting
the distributed load of each game [6]. However, due to the dynamic character of MMOGs,
both on the short and long term, the game providers have to overprovision their infrastructure,
which leads to a low and inefficient resource utilization and new providers finding it difficult
to join the market [7].
Massively multi-player online role-playing games follow a client-server model. When
using client-server architecture, it is necessary that the server intermediates the communication between each pair of players that game is intended to provide guaranties of consistency
and resistance to cheating [8]. Each of the players remotely controls one or several in game
characters called avatars. So, this server will have a large communication load, thus, it must
have enough resources to meet the demand of the game.
The problem is that it must be delegated to each serer node a load proportional to its power
when using a distributed server. No matter to which server each player is connected, their
game experience will be similar and the time it takes to be notified of actions from other
players as well as of state change in the virtual environment of the game.
The Players can freely move their avatars through the game world. This makes possible the formation of hot-spots around which the players are more connected than in
other regions of the virtual environment. MMORPGs not only permit but also stimulate
the formation of these points of interest. However, if these avatars are close to each other,
each player should be updated not only of his own actions, but also of the actions of the
other player.
So, it is not enough just to divide the players between servers, even if this division is
proportional to the resources of each one of them. Also, the overhead of the distribution is
an important issue.
Therefore, we propose a scheme that equally distribute of the load using a gaming usersoriented load balancing rather than a partition of maps on gaming server and compared to
the previous studies. In addition, we designed this to facilitate interactions between gaming
users, neighbor gaming users on the map as much as possible on a single gaming server,
MMORPGs gaming user-oriented load balancing scheme to map segmentation by combining the efficiency of the load balancing of the game in progress when raised of gaming
users.
The rest of the paper is structures as follows. Section 2 presents related woks. Section
3 describes our proposed architecture and provides the detailed gaming user-oriented load
balancing scheme. We present a performance evaluation and the mathematical analysis, and a
comparison of performance between the previous studies and the proposed scheme in Sect. 4.
And Sect. 5 constitutes a summary of our proposal.

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2 Related Works
In this paper, we aim at appropriate load balancing scheme based on gaming user oriented
method for MMORG. Several other woks have proposed load balancing scheme in this area,
covering various perspectives on suitable load balancing server model. But the most common
goal is to abstract a dynamic load balancing scheme focus on the network architecture and
provide a simple partition the map for MMORPGs.
The load distributing problem in conventional distributed systems has been studied in
the past decades and can be classified into static and adaptive algorithms, where adaptive
algorithms may be regarded as special class of dynamic algorithm. Dynamic load distributing algorithms can be further classified into load sharing algorithms and load balancing
algorithms [912]
Different researchers have tried to address the problem of partitioning the virtual environment in MMOGs (Massively Multi-player Online Games) for distribution among multiple
servers [13,14]. There is a static division into cells of fixed size and position [15]. This is
done by distributing one or more cells of the overload server to other servers.
In [16], they proposed a cell-oriented load balancing model. To balancing the load, their
algorithm finds, first, all clusters of cells that are managed by the overloaded server. The
smallest cluster is selected and, from this cluster, it is chosen the cell which has the least
interaction with other cells of the same server, the interaction between two cells A and B is
defined by the authors as the number of pairs of averts interacting with each other, one of
them in A and the other one in B [17]. The selected cell is then transferred to least loaded
server, considering load as the bandwidth used to send state updates to the players whose
avatars are positioned in the cells managed by that server. This process us repeated until the
server is no longer overloaded or there is no more servers capable of absorbing more load in
this case, one option could be to reduce the frequency at which state update message are sent
to the players, as suggested by Nae et al. [18].
In [19], a load shedding method, in which an overloaded server attempts do shed its load to
its neighbors. After finding a lightly loaded neighbor server, it transfers some of its boundary
microcells to that neighbor. To form the group of microcells to transfer, a microcell from the
border is chosen, and others are added in a breadth first search (BFS) order. A very similar
work, which also uses BFS, is described in Lee and Lee [20].
However, these models present a few points which could be improved. As we said above,
this is not the best measure, since the load on a server may vary completely, depending on
how these N players are distributed across the region managed by the server. Also, the user of
BFS to merge two partitions or split one of them may not be ideal. Some other algorithm for
graph partitioning applied to distributed system could be used, for most of these algorithms
were designed exactly to balance load and minimized dependence between nodes.

3 Gaming User-Oriented Load Balancing Scheme

Massively multi-player online role-playing games places importance on interaction between
gaming users and this interaction usually takes place in visual range in the game. Gaming
users can freely move their avatars throughout the game world. This makes possible the
formation of hotspots, around which the players are more concentrated than in other regions
of the virtual environment. Moreover, MMORPGs not only permit but also stimulate, to some
extent, the formation of these points of interest. In the worlds of these MMORPGs, there
are entire cities, where the players meet to chat, exchange virtual goods or even fight, and

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Fig. 1 Proposed system architecture

Fig. 2 Neighbor gaming
user-oriented load balancing

there are also areas, with few attractions for the players, and where the number of avatars is
relatively small compared to other places of the environment.
Therefore, when gaming users are within visual range of each other, it is best to locate
them in one server. To manage gaming users like the above, both the scope of interactions
and probable interactions have to be taken into account and then set the neighboring gaming
users area to about 1.52 times the visual range with the gaming users at the center. All
servers have the same capacity, each one being able to handle same gaming users.
When new gaming users process to log-in, first check whether the existing gaming users
are in the nearest gaming user area and if they are, then distribute the new gaming users to the
nearest gaming user areas. We show the architecture of the proposed system configuration for
load balancing of gaming users in Fig. 1.When there is an unbalanced region, it is selected a
local group of regions, similar to what was shown in above. It will be used an algorithm whose
parameters are only the loads of the cells and their interactions, for such data is available
prior to distribute. Finally, with the regions already balanced, the algorithm of K-mean be
used to refine the partitioning, reducing the edge-cut and, thus, the overhead, while keeping
the balance.

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Fig. 3 Proposed scheme

Figure 2 shows an example of the nearest gaming user distribution scheme. Server A and
Server B each has 4 and 3 gaming users and gaming user 1 and gaming user 2 are logged-in.
The load balancing server compares the location of the currently logged-in gaming users 1
and 2 and then allocates gaming users 1 and 2 to either server A and B depending on which
one has the nearest gaming user.
For load-balancing, each the center of each gaming server gets updated at the loadbalancing server and this point is equated by the average coordinates of the game users.
Load-balancing servers distribute gaming users to the server which is closest to the center of
the server when new game users log-in and when all gaming users of the game servers are
not included in the nearest section as showed in Fig. 3.

4 Performance Analysis of Proposed Scheme

Massively multi-player online role-playing games do not distribute equally accordingly to
the gaming user preference of location and problems in the geography of the game maps,
and problems also occur in hot-spots [12,13].
Figure 4 shows a figure of a situation in which the server relocates when a 1,024*512
sized maps coordinates are (0, 0)(512, 512) and the ratio of the accessing of the gaming
users are increased by 1:1, 2:1, 3:1, 4:1, and 5:1. It also shows that in the case dynamic map
partitioning load-balancing, the rate of the gaming users relocation and the relocation of the
server itself is proportionate to the increase of the condensation of the gaming users.
When a total number of gaming users is 200300, the transmission occurs most active and
increasing movement the total number of gaming users in Fig. 5. Since then, increasing the
total number of gaming users show map split stabilize to previous time gradually decreased

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Fig. 4 Comparison of server distribution methods

Fig. 5 Comparison of gaming users in dynamic map partition by cell

Fig. 6 Comparison of gaming users in dynamic map partition by our scheme

embroidery. However, the total number of gaming user increases, the cell by gaming users
may increase the risk also increased during the previous embroidery on a single server,
instantly causes a large overhead increases
Our gaming user-oriented scheme, as shown in the graph Fig. 6, depending on the total
number of gaming users without large fluctuations, the server picked embroidery and has
a number of previous. During a game total of the number of users to access up to 1,000
people, average 156 people, split map previous game, 99 of gaming user-oriented game
server. Regardless of the increase in the density of gaming users belonging to the cell due to

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Fig. 7 Comparison of gaming users by users congestion

the increase of one piece gaming user to perform before the game server with our proposed
scheme.
However, game user-oriented load-balancing shows that there is no difference in the
relocation of the server and gaming users despite the increase of the difference in the log-in
rates of areas. Hence gaming user-oriented load-balancing is a much more flexible gaming
user location distribution method and more efficient at relocating servers than dynamic map
partitioning load-balancing. In the Fig. 7 present the above descriptions.

5 Conclusions
Existing load balancing schemes for distributed virtual environments and multiplayer games
try to balance the workload among servers by transferring some workload of an overloaded
server to other servers. While load balancing algorithms can minimize the average response
time of the system, they may also result in frequent client migrations, which may damage
the interactivity of an online games. To solve this, many developers devote research to loadbalancing servers, yet due to steady and dynamic map divisions, such research is unreliable.
Many developers propose algorithms to distribute the load on the server nodes, but the load
is usually defined as the number of players on each server, what is not an ideal results.
So, we proposed two schemes, taking care of neighboring gaming users in one server
by searching for nearby gaming users when one logs-in a server, and lessening the load
that occurs by server relocation by using gradients between servers to relocate the servers
resulting in a common critical section. Relocation of servers with load-balancing showed an
efficiency of about 40 % with a number of total gaming users at 1,000, map distribution at an
average of 156 persons, and gaming user-oriented distribution server had 99 gaming users
relocated.
Also, according to gaming user preferences, dynamic map partitioning load-balancing had
server relocation and relocated gaming users grow proportionally to the condensing of the
gaming users in a specific location. Compared to that, our scheme showed no large difference
in the rate of server relocation despite the increase differences in the amount of gaming users
in a game area.
Acknowledgments This research was supported by the MKE (The Ministry of Knowledge Economy), NHN
Corp., under IT/SW Creative research program supervised by the NIPA (National IT Industry Promotion
Agency) (NIPA-2012-H0506-12-101)). This Research was supported by the Sookmyung Womens University
Research Grants (11303-0109)

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Author Biographies
Hye-Young Kim received the B.Sc. degree and M.S. degree in Computer Science from the SookMyung University in South Korea and
Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Korea
University of South Korea in February 2005. During her Ph.D. study,
she had focusing on location management scheme, such as mobile
Ipv6, cellular network and network mobility. Currently, she works at
Hongik University of South Korea as Associate Professor. She had
developed a network protocol for 9 years (19891997) while she was
working at Hyundai Electronics as a senior researcher. She had taught
in the Department of Computer Game at Chung Kang College as
an assistant professor for 3 years (20012004). Her research interests
include traffic modeling and location management in mobile network
and wireless network for mobile game or multimedia service.

Hwa-Jin Park received the B.Sc. degree and M.Sc. degree in Computer Science from the Sookmyung Womens University in Rep. of
Korea in 1987 and Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Arizona State University in 1997. She worked as a senior
researcher in Samsung Data System (SDS) for a while and as a fulltime lecturer in computer science in Pyung-Taek University for 2
years (19981999). Currently she is serving as a professor of multimedia science in Sookmyung womens University(2000present). During
her Ph.D. study, she had focusing on computer graphic 3D modeling, CAGD, and virtual reality. She was involved in telemedicine and
PACS projects in Samsung SDS. Her main research interests include
3D graphics modeling and a serious game.

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