SATELLITE GAME SERVER: OVERVIEW AND ANALYSIS

Online gaming has in recent years grown as an entertainment service for many users. As the number of users who play games continues to increase, it requires a massive amount of computing resources to ensure the desired gaming experience for the users. This master's thesis presents the trends, issues and possibilities of a satellite game server. A server is designed to handle traffic and provide a place for all the events that are going on, in a game, to be wrapped up in a single package that is constantly sent over a communication network. Game development started with big companies with huge budget releasing high quality games. They employed the use of a dedicated server, this is a machine running in a building somewhere for a specific purpose, for the users playing games to connect to and it handles all the host services. This thesis revolves around the possibilities of having a game server launched in space and will focus on the basic guidelines and issues. The main aim and objective of this thesis is to provide the reader the general overview of the idea of a satellite-based game server, its advantages over existing types of game servers, what constitutes in the technology, market trends, future growth of technologies and possibly how it can be implemented. The thesis is motivated by the tremendous growth in game development in recent years and the numerous advantages of satellite communications. The satellite internet (VSAT) has already been employed as an alternative internet access for online gamers, especially for its advantage of having a global coverage to reach gamers where the IP connection is impossible. To meet an increasing demand for online game services and connectivity across the world, satellite server will play an indispensable role in the reach of online gamers globally, therefore increasing the market of online games. The thesis investigates and concludes that the construction of a working satellite game server solution is possible to achieve on a high budget and several issues yet to be resolved but will be cost effective at the long term.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format