End-to-end transmission control mechanisms for multiparty interactive applications on the Internet

This paper reports on the design and the evaluation of transmission control mechanisms specifically designed for multiplayer, distributed (serverless), interactive Internet applications. Distributed synchronization and dead reckoning are the main elements of this transmission control infrastructure. These mechanisms have been implemented in a fully distributed, multiplayer game application, i.e., one in which each entity in a game session computes its own local view of the session. The role of each entity is consequently to periodically send its own state to all other session participants (using RTP/UDP/IP multicast) and to periodically compute its own local view of the global game state using information received from the other participants. A detailed experimental analysis is provided using MBone and LAN experiments. We investigate how the "quality" of the game is influenced by the frequency at which players exchange state information, as well as by network impairments such as packet loss and transmission delay.