Comparing Properties of Massively Multiplayer Online Worlds and the Internet of Things

With the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT), this means recognizing the need for architectures to handle billions of devices and their interactions. A virtual world engine at the massively multiplayer scale is a massively multiplayer online world (MMOW); one thing virtual world engines realized when going into the scale of MMOs, is the cost of maintaining a potentially quadratic number of interactions between a massive number of objects, laid out in a spatial dimension. Research into IoT was fueled by research in wireless sensor networks, but rather than start from a device perspective, this article looks at how architectures deal with interacting entities at large scale. The domain of MMOWs is examined for properties that are affected by scale. Thereafter the domain of IoT is evaluated to see if each of those properties are found and how each is handled. By comparing the current state of the art of MMOWs and IoT, with respect to scalability, the problem of scaling IoT is explicated, as well as the problem of incorporating an MMOW with IoT into a pervasive platform. Three case studies of a MMOW interfacing with IoT are presented in closing.