Mirrored arbiter architecture: a network architecture for large scale multiplayer games

Abstract

Massively Multiplayer games become increasingly popular. Different multiplayer games are implemented on top of different network architectures based on the characteristics of the games. Typically, multiplayer games run on Client-Server (CS), Peer-to-Peer (P2P), Client-Multi-Server (CMS), or Peer-to-Peer with Central Arbiter (PP-CA) architectures. In this paper, we first examine these architectures from two perspectives: bandwidth requirements at the server and clients, and latency. We then propose a Mirrored-Arbiter (MA) architecture that combines the merits of CMS and PP-CA. This architecture takes all the benefits of PP-CA, but also resolves the main problems in PP-CA by using interest management technique and multicast. We implemented a multiplayer game called "TankWar" to validate the design of the proposed MA architecture. Both analysis and experiment were conducted to show the effectiveness of MA architecture.