On designing an event delivery service for multiplayer networked games: An approach based on obsolescence

In this paper we discuss the design of an event delivery service devised to support multiplayer games on distributed computing architectures. The novelty of our approach is that obsolete events may be dropped with the aim of maintaining an acceptable interaction degree among remote players. The key concept on which our approach is based is to take into consideration events at the application level, and to avoid the delivery of those events that lose their importance due to obsolescence. We conducted several experiments that show that our approach is able to maintain the consistency of the distributed game state and, at the same time, reduces the overall communication traffic among distributed players.