Online gaming is increasingly popular. As such, server efficiency is becoming an increasingly urgent priority. With millions of players interacting in real-time, game servers are under enormous pressure to process a huge amount of data without latency (delays) or crashes. Research in the International Journal of Information and Communication Technology discusses an innovative solution to the problem, offering a promising path to greater stability and performance in mobile real-time strategy games and beyond.

WenZhen Wang of the Animation Art Department at Zibo Vocational Institute, Zibo, Shandong, China, hope to address the most critical issue in online multiplayer games—load balancing to ensure there is a high level of concurrency and interactivity.

Load balancing refers to the distribution of work across multiple servers to prevent any one server from being overwhelmed. If a server receives too many requests at once, it can slow down, leading to frustrating lag or even server crashes. Ensuring efficient distribution of this workload is essential to maintaining a seamless gaming experience.

Wang has introduced a new method for handling load balancing using a "consistent hash" algorithm. In simple terms, a hash function takes an input—player activity or game data—and converts it into a fixed-size output, a sequence of characters, or hash. This consistent hash helps the system allocate data and tasks across multiple servers more evenly because it knows in advance the size of the packets of data, rather than having to handle packets of different sizes on the fly.

The main advantage lies in its adaptability to the highly dynamic environments of multiplayer games, where the number of players and the complexity of in-game interactions changes quickly throughout the game.

To test the effectiveness of the algorithm, Wang ran virtual simulations replicating real-world game scenarios and demonstrated that the approach allowed for load balancing that led to stable server operations. The system could then handle large numbers of simultaneous player interactions while maintaining performance quality.

More information: WenZhen Wang, Virtual simulation of game scene based on communication load balancing algorithm, International Journal of Information and Communication Technology (2024). DOI: 10.1504/IJICT.2024.141435