Shift Coding: Efficient State Update in Mobile Peer-to-Peer Multiplayer Games

The rapid advancement in wireless communications and mobile computing devices has opened a wide door for developing interesting mobile peer-to-peer multi-player games (MMGs). In this paper we study an important problem of game state update in MMGs. Based on the network coding theory, we design the shift coding algorithm. Shift coding is running on a finely regulated ring overlay and lets each node exchange coded state information with its two immediate neighbors. After a few rounds of exchange, every node is guaranteed to receive the state information of all the other game members. The results of experimental results have shown that shift coding can significantly reduce network traffic under various network configurations.