A DHT-based hierarchical overlay for Peer-to-Peer MMOGs over MANETs

Abstract

Massively Multi-player Online Games (MMOGs) as representative Networked Virtual Environments (NVEs) applications have been gaining popularity in the past decade. Recently, MMOGs on mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are attracting more and more attention in the research community, due to the widespread of mobile ad hoc devices (e.g. smart phones, iPad etc.), and their continuous increase of processing power and communication resources. However, supporting MMOGs over bandwidth and resource constrained and multi-hop MANETs is challenging. The existing general purpose routing protocols and P2P overlays such as Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs) over MANETs are not suitable for supporting MMOGs. This paper proposes a DHT-based and hierarchical overlay to address the issues. The overlay provides unique features including system portability, topology-awareness, responsiveness, unicast and DHT integration, and extreme scalability. The successful P2P MMOG technique such as interest management thereafter can be applied on top of the overlay to enable P2P MMOGs over MANETs.