A Peer-to-Peer Communication Architecture for Networked Games

Although IP multicast can be used to support message transmission among players in large network games running on Intranets, it is mostly not available on the Internet. Alternatively, researches have in recent years proposed the use of Application Layer Multicasting techniques (ALM) to alleviate this problem and to allow a somewhat scalable message passing among peers in a group of users on the Internet. In this paper, we propose a peer-to-peer communication architecture for networked games. Our architecture uses both proxies and end-systems to provide a number of communication services: 1) best effort LAN multicast 2) timely-reliable LAN multicast 3) best effort P2P delivery on the Internet 4) timely-reliable P2P delivery on the Internet, and 5) any combination of the above, including LAN to Internet translation and vice versa. Our filed trials using a shoot‘em up game show that the proposed framework performs satisfactorily over the Internet.