Network Game Server Communication Architecture And Key Technologies

As the network technology and hardware performance improved greatly, online game with the fastest growth in cyber game industry, is now the new emerging profit-added field in IT industry. More and more professional game developers are engaging in this industry, while the tremendous market potential has drawn great attentions from nations and societies.The games industry in China is now at a quick pace to develop in spite of a comparatively late start and slow research for historical reasons. The servers of online games are currently going through tough pressure of performance and loads due to increasing players. Thus, good design of server is getting more decisive than before for providing better services. Researches on communication architecture and related core technologies will play a positive role in development of games nowadays and the whole game industry.Servers of online games should possess high stability and quick response to clients'access for massive services. Each process of data processing has its impact on server performance improvement, but communication at system's low level has the fundamental and supportive function. Communication's efficiency is directly subject to allocation of system resources, management of sockets, selection of I/O mode, concurrency and load balance strategy, etc.This thesis will first focus on analysis and discussion of these several communication technology concerned.And based on the explanation of system level framework, it emphasizes on the functionality requirement and architecture design of the communication system. Also, the event subscription and message driven mechanism, on which system is dependent to run, will be deeply discussed.As we known, a well-designed system should try to eliminate coupling among modules, and get changes encapsulated using design patterns, so good expansibility and maintainability can be achieved. Detailed analysis and design on core modules of server network architecture are introduced into this thesis by Object-Oriented way.Network I/O management is discussed for handling of massive clients'connection and data transfer. And then it studies how to design the connection conversation and analyze conversation status in order to monitor the idle of illegal ones. Also, it researches the layer of communication protocol, definition of data format at each layer, and implementation of transition from protocol data to special transaction. Finally, it analyzes the implementation of resource pre-allocation mechanism - thread pool, and discusses the design ideas and technical advantages of allocator/workers strategy.The study of communication system architecture and analysis of designing practices on core technologies in this thesis are very good materials for engineering reference to know or resolve primary problems in server design.