Object Replication and Consistency Control Techniques of P2P Structures for Multiplayer Online Games

The main game architectures for multiplayer online games are the traditional client-server architectures, multi-server architectures and P2P(peer-to-peer) architectures. P2P architectures, due to their distributed and collaborative nature, have low infrastructure costs and can achieve high scalability as well as fast response time by creating direct connections between players. However, P2P architectures face many challenges. Distributing a game among peers makes maintaining control over the game more complex. These architectures also tend to be vulnerable to churn and cheating. Providing consistency control in P2P systems is also more difficult since conflicting updates might be executed at different sites resulting in inconsistency. In order to avoid or correct inconsistencies, most multiplayer games use a primary-copy replication approach where any update to the object has to be first performed on the primary copy. This paper presents the primary-copy model with the update dissemination mechanism that provides consistency control over an object in P2P architectures for multiplayer online games. The performance for this model is evaluated through simulation experiments and anaysis.