Supervision : Pierre SENS

Co-supervision : MARIN Olivier, MONNET Sébastien

Scalable services for massively multiplayer online games

Massively Multi-player Online Games (MMOGs) aim at gathering an infinite number of players within the same virtual universe. Yet all existing MMOGs rely on centralized client/server architectures which impose a limit on the maximum number of players (avatars) and resources that can coexist in any given virtual universe. This thesis aims at proposing solutions to improve the scalability of MMOGs. To address the wide variety of their concerns, MMOGs rely on independent services such as virtual world hosting, avatar storage, matchmaking, cheat detection, and game design. This thesis explores two services that are crucial to all MMOG variants: matchmaking and cheat detection. Both services are known bottlenecks, and yet current implementations remain centralized. This thesis propose algorithms and guidelines relative to the matchmaking problem in order to improve future matchmaking services. This thesis also shows that it is possible to design a peer to peer refereeing service on top of a reputation system. The resulting service remains highly efficient on a large scale, both in terms of performance and in terms of cheat prevention. Since refereeing is somewhat similar to failure detection, this thesis extends the proposed approach to monitor failures. The resulting failure detection service scales with the number of monitored nodes and tolerates jitter.

2012-2015 Publications