The near-term feasibility of P2P MMOG´s

Broadly deployed distributed virtual environments (DVE´s) are based upon client-server architectures. Significant research over the last decade proposes a variety of distributed topologies for message propagation to enhance scalability and performance. We ran simulations using traces from World of Warcraft (WoW) and typical broadband speeds, and found that DVE´s such as WoW could not employ P2P message propagation schemes. We found pure P2P pub-sub solutions would occasionally saturate residential broadband connections, and would result in average latency more than lOx greater than client-server solutions. To our surprise, we discovered message aggregation before transmission can not only reduce bandwidth requirements, but also reduce latency in both client-server and P2P message propagation schemes.