A Survey of AoIM, Distribution and Communication in Peer-To-Peer Online Games

In this paper we discuss the issues relating to architecture formation in MMOGs and the two principal design choices that must be made when constructing a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) MMOG: the Area of Interest Management (AoIM) scheme and the distribution and communication mechanism. We introduce an updated survey of the state-of-the-art of AoIM in P2P Online Games. We identify key issues in the development and deployment of such architectures. We analyze the main features of existing solutions. The contribution of the paper is a novel perspective in understanding the limitations of existing solutions and discussing the design criteria for an alternative P2P approach to alleviate scalability issues.