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Enhanced mirrored servers for network games

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Open access
Authors
Webb, Steven
Soh, Sieteng
Lau, William
Date
2007
Type
Conference Paper

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Citation
Webb, Steven Daniel and Soh, Sieteng and Lau, William. 2007. Enhanced mirrored servers for network games, in Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Network and System Support for Games. (ed), NetGames '07, September 19-20, 2007, pp. 117-122, Melbourne, Australia: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
Source Conference
NetGames '07: Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Network and System Support for Games
DOI
Faculty
School of Electrical Engineering & Computing
Science and Engineering
School
Department of Computing
Remarks

© ACM, 2007. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in NetGames '07: Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Network and system support for games, ISBN: 978-0-9804460-0-5, 2007. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1326257.1326278

A link to the Publisher's website is available at: http://www.acm.org/

The Publisher/PDF's version is available at: http://caia.swin.edu.au/netgames2007/papers/1569046162.pdf

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Abstract

The Mirrored Server (MS) architecture uses multiple mirrored servers across multiple locations to alleviate the bandwidth bottleneck in the Client/Server (C/S) architecture. Each mirror receives and multicasts player updates to the others, simulates the game, and disseminates the new game state to players. However, keeping the game state consistent between mirrors in the presence of network delay, and maintaining game responsiveness requires each server in MS to simulate the game multiple times for each game update, and additional times in the event of costly rollbacks. In this paper we propose the Enhanced Mirrored Server (EMS) architecture. Like in the Peer-to-Peer architecture, EMS allows peers to exchange updates directly, resulting in a higher tolerance to delay at the mirrors. We propose using bucket synchronization in the mirrors so that each server in EMS simulates the game only once for each update and does not require rollbacks. The server disseminates updates to clients only in the event of inconsistency, and thus its outgoing bandwidth is lower than in MS. Our EMS uses cryptographic techniques to provide security equivalent to C/S, and prevents the timestamp cheat possible in MS. Our analytical analysis and simulations show the advantages of EMS over MS.