A Peer-to-Peer Massive Battle Observing System to Support Game Live

Gaming services are attractive for Internet users. How to broadcast live gaming services to large-scale Internet users is still a big problem. Traditional schemes, based on Peer-to-Peer (P2P) live-streaming and based on TV shows, have poor user experiences (good graphic quality with high resolution) and need big bandwidth or TV set support. In order to avoid network congestion, a small number of solutions propose an alternative approach based on game data content instead of video content to provide game live services. At present, all of them who use client/server framework do not emphasize the design of system architecture, so the number of users is constrained and the system is hard to expand. In this paper, we introduce PKTV, a P2P game battle observing system, which is now optimized specially for War craft 3. PKTV system broadcasts game data content to reduce bandwidth overhead, maintains a P2P overlay for each gaming channel and uses a reliable UDP protocol to break the limitation of the TCP connections, decentralizes servers to enhance system´s availability and scalability. Furthermore, tests and simulations show that PKTV also have robust functionality and good performance: low-latency, low bandwidth consumption and very considerable bandwidth savings for servers.