A federated peer-to-peer game is constructed as a set of peer groups within which players communicate with all other members and between which players can move. Federated peer-to-peer games potentially allow a more scalable and fault tolerant gaming architecture than that achievable using a central server. While the literature contains many proposals for such gaming infrastructure, little work has been done describing the network protocols required to support such a model. Gaming presents distinct challenges to network protocol designers, particularly in respect to its sensitivity to latency and loss. We describe the algorithms and communication patterns of gaming specific network protocols and present the results of our experiments. We show that a dedicated game transport protocol achieves good end-to-end delay across very lossy, jittery networks.
By: Sean Rooney, Rudy Deydier and Daniel Bauer
Published in: RZ3521 in 2003
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