Efficiently Maintaining Consistency Using Tree-Based P2P Network System in Distributed Network Games

There are two main approaches, conservative and optimistic, for maintaining consistency in distributed network games. Under the conservative approach, players may experience network latency, depending on packet transfer delay caused by the send-and-wait and acknowledging processes. Under the optimistic approach, the processes do not wait for other players’ packets and advance to their own frames, hence there is no network latency. However, when inconsistency happens, the processes must roll back. This can cause irritation and confusion to players, and thus the game quality deteriorates. Overall, the optimistic approach may not be suitable for networked games. To overcome the network latency problem in the conservative approach, we propose a new system which can reduce the network latency and bandwidth requirements. Furthermore, the effect of the number of players in multiplayer game sessions is examined in detail with varying number of players. Experimental results with our proposed system confirm improved performances in latency and frame rate.