Multimed Tools Appl (2009) 45:263–289 DOI 10.1007/s11042-009-0302-z A load balancing scheme for massively multiplayer online games Carlos Eduardo Benevides Bezerra · Cláudio Fernando Resin Geyer Published online: 21 May 2009 © Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2009 Abstract In a distributed MMOG (massively multiplayer online game) server archi- tecture, the server nodes may become easily overloaded by the high demand from the players for state updates. Many works propose algorithms to distribute the load on the server nodes, but this load is usually defined as the number of players on each server, what is not an ideal measure. Also, the possible heterogeneity of the system is frequently overlooked. We propose a balancing scheme with two main goals: allocate load on server nodes proportionally to each one’s power and reduce the inter- server communication overhead, considering the load as the occupied bandwidth of each server. Four algorithms were proposed, from which ProGReGA is the best for overhead reduction and ProGReGA-KF is the most suited for reducing player migrations between servers. We also make a review of related works and some comparisons were made, where our approach performed better. Keywords MMOGs · Load balancing · Distributed server · Graph partitioning 1 Introduction The main characteristic of massively multiplayer online games is the large number of players, having dozens, or even hundreds, of thousands of participants simultane- ously. This large number of players interacting with one another generates a traffic on the support network which may grow quadratically compared to the number of players [5], in the worst case (Fig. 1). C. E. B. Bezerra (B ) · C. F. R. Geyer Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Av. Bento Gonçalves, 9500, Porto Alegre, Brazil e-mail: carlos.bezerra@inf.ufrgs.br C. F. R. Geyer e-mail: geyer@inf.ufrgs.br