An evaluation of grouping techniques for state dissemination in networked multi-user games

In a distributed multi-user game, entities need to communicate their state information to other entities. Usually only a subset of the game´s entities are interested in information being disseminated by any particular entity. In a large scale distributed game, broadcasting messages containing each information to all participants and applying a relevance filter at the end host is wasteful in both network and processing resources. We consider techniques that address this problem by dividing the entities into groups and using multicast communication to disseminate information to the groups which would be interested in such information. We investigate two grouping strategies: cell-based grouping and entity-based grouping. Our goal is to understand the tradeoffs between grouping overhead and communication overhead and compare the cost of both strategies under various conditions