server topology considerations in online games
The selection of servers within the network affect both the participants' playability and the overall game fairness. This paper defines the concept of critical response time and uses it as the objective function for the server selection optimization problem we formulate and solve for small topologies. An approximate heuristic solution usable for large networks is introduced and its performance compared to the calculable lower bound of the critical response time. In our simulations, the heuristic converges towards a close to optimum critical response time. We also compare this solution to central server selection strategies and show that it outperforms them, both in terms of playability and fairness.
playability fairness server selection optimization network game