RTF+Shark: Using Software-Defined Networks for Multiplayer Online Games

We demonstrate how Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG) can benefit from the emerging Software-Defined Networking (SDN) technology. We integrate Shark 3D™ - an industry-strength 3D game development framework - with the Real-Time Framework (RTF) - an open-source C++ library enhanced for SDN that provides development and runtime support for MMOG. This integration enables game developers to exploit SDN for guaranteeing network QoS in MMOG. A case study of an MMOG-like application in a real, SDN-enabled network shows the advantages of our approach.