On maintaining interactivity in event delivery synchronization for mirrored game architectures

Online amusement applications, as distributed multiplayer videogames and interactive story telling, are gaining increasing attention both from entertainment industry and from scientific community. Providing a pleasant experience to players requires a rapid delivery of game actions among the various nodes in the network. A high playability degree should be guaranteed independently of the user's location, utilized device (PC, PDA, cellphone), type of connection (wired, wireless), and number of contemporary players. To this aim, we have devised an innovative approach to design the event delivery service for networked multiplayer game applications. Exploiting the semantics of the game, our scheme relaxes the ordering and reliability properties, upholding the interactivity level while preserving the game state consistency. The main contribution of our work is to show the benefits in event delivery synchronization obtained by employing, in this context, RED techniques borrowed from networking queuing management.