Integration of Flight Simulator 2002 with an epidemic multicast protocol

Multi-player games are increasingly popular in the Internet. This growing interest results in the need to support a high number of participants, which raises the issue of scalability, namely in what regards the ability to offer good performance in such a large-scale setting. This paper addresses the issue of designing middleware solutions to support large-scale multi-player applications. In particular, we are interested in studying the feasibility of using epidemic multicast protocols for information dissemination in multi-player games based on a peer-topeer architecture. We have integrated a comercial multiplayer game, the Microsoft Flight Simulator 2002, with an epidemic multicast protocol appropriate to this kind of applications, the NEEM. The paper describes how this integration was achieved and presents evaluation results of the resulting prototype.