Supporting P2P gaming when players have heterogeneous resources

We present Ghost, a peer-to-peer game architecture that manages game consistency across a set of players with heterogeneous network resources. Ghost dynamically creates responsive sub-games based on the delay profiles of players. Ghost allows each user to set the quality of game they are willing to play and creates the maximum-sized game that satisfies the users’ requirements. Ghost extends our earlier Asynchronous Synchronization (AS) protocol, which provides cheat-free playout for peer-to-peer games. This modification to AS enables p2p games to efficiently function in network environments that would typically be hostile to multiplayer networked games. These include networks with highly variable delays and variable route partitions. Our evaluation shows that Ghost performs well, always ensuring consistent p2p play with the maximum number of players, while preventing any one player from destroying the quality of play for others.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: NOSSDAV
• Authors: Aaron St. John, Brian Neil Levine
• Keywords: Ghost, NOSSDAV 2005, Operating Systems, Peer-to-peer Game Architecture, Peer-to-peer Games