A Voronoi Partitioning Approach to Support Massively Multiplayer Online Games

We propose an approach to support massively multiplayer online games on a peer-to-peer system. Our approach is based on the fact that players are more interested in their region of visibility and influence than in the other regions. We use a computational geometry technique – Voronoi Diagram – to partition the game space into regions. The Voronoi partitioning gives some good closeness and locality properties. The players in a region communicate with other players through the coordinator of the region. The resulting system scales up with the number of players and is able to distribute region updates in a scalable manner. We also propose techniques for fault tolerance in the wake of node failures. We have implemented a simple game to study the feasibility of this approach.