Multi-level Consistency Control Techniques in P2P Multiplayer Game Architectures with Primary Copy

A Multiplayer Online Game(MOG) is a game capable of supporting hundreds or thousands of players and is mostly played using the Internet. P2P(peer-to-peer) architectures for MOGs can potentially achieve high scalability, low cost, and good performance. The basic idea of many P2P-based games is to distribute the game state among peers and along with it processing, network, and storage tasks. In a primary-copy based replication scheme where any update to the object has to be first performed on the primary copy, this means distributing primary copies of objects among peers. Most multiplayer games use a primary-copy model in order to provide strong consistency control over an object. Games consist of various types of actions that have different levels of sensitivity and can be categorized according to their consistency requirements. With the appropriate consistency level of each action type within a game, this paper allows developers to choose the right trade-off between performance and consistency. The performance for P2P game architecture with the primary-copy model is evaluated through simulation experiments and analysis.