Review: Observations on Game Server Discovery Mechanisms

Tristan Henderson, "Observations on Game Server Discovery Mechanisms," In proceedings of the 1st workshop on Network and system support for games, pp 47-52, April 2002.

The author of this paper analyses the game traces to find the way how the clients chose a game server. In the current conditions, the server discovery is almost centralized, where the game server advertises themselves in some centralized directory service. The clients query this directory servers to get the list of servers, pings the servers, and chose a server that is nearby. The directory service is distributed over small number of servers positioned at different geographical locations to serve the queries originate from the area.

This centralized directory server-based implementation suffers from many drawbacks: single point failure, stale information, redundancy due to game servers advertising themselves in many directory servers, dependency on network conditions, and long server query time are some of the drawbacks.

motivated by the success of P2P file sharing system, a P2P server discovery mechanism is proposed in this paper. Each client maintains a partial list of existing servers it used in the past. These lists can be aggregated on-demand (when a new client requests) by a gossiping mechanism involving both clients and servers (servers act as the connecting points). This design alleviates or reduces the problems in the centralized implementation mentioned above. The paper does not provide any experimental/simulation results to evaluate the performance of the proposed system.