Event Ordering and Congestion Control for Distributed Multiplayer Games

Abstract

Peer-to-peer, multiplayer games require secure event ordering, bounded latency between any two players, and a real-time transport protocol that includes congestion control. In the past, research has focused on solving one of these three issues, but has yet to address all of them in conjunction. In this paper, we design the NEO protocol to provide all three of these features in a fully-distributed, peer-to-peer game. We first prove that NEO can prevent five common, protocol-level cheats. We then use simulation to demonstrate that NEO can adhere to the latency restraints of a real-time, interactive application. Finally, we conduct an extensive simulation study to show that NEO has a stable congestion control algorithm that can react to changing network conditions and maintain fairness with TCP traffic. To the best of our knowledge, NEO is the first protocol that can meet all of these requirements