Adaptive Event Dissemination for Peer-to-Peer Multiplayer Online Games

Abstract

In this paper we show that gossip algorithms may be effectively used to disseminate game events in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Multiplayer Online Games (MOGs). Game events are disseminated through an overlay network. The proposed scheme exploits the typical behavior of players to tune the data dissemination. In fact, it is well known that users playing a MOG typically generate game events at a rate that can be approximated using some (game dependent) probability distribution. Hence, as soon as a given node experiences a reception rate, for messages coming from a given peer, which is lower than expected, it can send a stimulus to the neighbor that usually forwards these messages, asking it to increase its dissemination probability. Three variants of this approach will be studied. According to the first one, upon reception of a stimulus from a neighbor, a peer increases its dissemination probability towards that node irrespectively from the sender. In the second protocol a peer increases only the dissemination probability for a given sender towards all its neighbors. Finally, the third protocol takes into consideration both the sender and the neighbor in order to decide how to increase the dissemination probability. We performed extensive simulations to assess the efficacy of the proposed scheme, and based on the simulation results we compare the different dissemination protocols. The results confirm that adaptive gossip schemes are indeed effective and deserve further investigation.0 The publisher version of this paper is available at

Resource discovery for distributed computing systems: A comprehensive survey

“…Gossiping based solutions might be considered as a type of epidemic protocol because a node that gossips a query or a resource information can be seen as it infects its neighbor. The advantage of Gossiping is its robust capability for disseminating and delivering contents to (almost) all destination peers with a very high probability [227,253,254]. Thus these solutions may become fast, scalable and load balanced since they provide a statical guarantee on the number of nodes involved during the query/information dissemination process.…”

Highly intensive data dissemination in complex networks

“…Many works propose its utilization in several application domains. Examples are information spreading in mobile ad-hoc environments [13,14,15], multicast [16], multiplayer online games and distributed virtual environments [10], multiresolution data representations for sensor networks [17], opportunistic networks [18,19], publishsubscribe systems [20,4,21], query processing over XML data [22], resource discovery [23,24,5,25,26], resource management in cloud computing and distributed systems [27,28], social networks [29], community detection [30], etc.…”

“…Today, the use of parallel and distributed simulation, coupled with the use of actual multi/many-core processors, makes this possible. Some previous works have demonstrated via simulation that gossip strategies can be proficiently employed to disseminate data in P2P overlay networks [1,10,38,9]. In particular, [9] presents a study of a gossip-based protocol for computing aggregate values over network components in a fully decentralized fashion.…”

“…It is also important to identify appropriate cost metrics, so that all dissemination protocols can be compared in the same conditions. in this sense, a useful measure is the overhead ratio ρ which is measured as follows [10]:…”

“…It is worth pointing out that the overlay creation and management does not consider issues concerned with the underlying physical network and proximity of nodes. This is a common practice during the evaluation of a P2P protocol over an unstructured overlay [1,2,4,5,9,10,20,27,54,56]. Indeed, adding variables related to physical networks, such as network proximity and variable delay in message transmission, would increase the complexity of the model, hence making more difficult to extract and compare some general results related to the performance of a dissemination protocol in an overlay.…”