Mercury: a scalable publish-subscribe system for internet games

Today's network games suffer from scalability and performance limitations caused by centralized client-server architectures and/or broadcast communication. In this paper, we argue that the communication between components of a game can be modeled as a publish-subscribe system. We present the design of MERCURY, a completely distributed publish-subscribe system, which supports a content-based publish-subscribe model of communication and performs distributed matching using a novel content-based routing protocol. We also present preliminary simulation results identifying key design decisions affecting the scalability and network efficiency of the system.