PKTown: A Peer-to-Peer Middleware to Support Multiplayer Online Games

Peer-to-peer (P2P) system can support service for lots of end users with little hardware investment, which suits for the efforts to lower down the service cost for multiplayer online games (MOG). In this paper, we introduce PKTown, a P2P middleware inserted into Star Craft and the network layer. PKTown captures all packets generated by Star Craft. We apply application layer multicast (ALM) to transmit the broadcast packets through overlay network. PKTown extends the LAN game experiences to players belong to different LAN. We design a k-regular random overlay network based on game specific requirements analysis. No change is made on binary code of Star Craft. Preliminary test results show that PKTown works well and supports other MOG in the same way. Our contribution is to provide a new game experience method with little hardware investment.