Title :
A fair synchronization protocol with cheat proofing for decentralized online multiplayer games
Author :
Di Chen, Bei ; Maheswaran, Muthucumaru
Author_Institution :
Sch. of Comput. Sci., McGill Univ., Montreal, Que., Canada
Abstract :
One of the key issues with decentralized online multi-player games is ensuring fairness of game play despite different network latencies. One approach is to follow a "lock step" scheme that prevents any player from acting upon a message until that message is received by all the players. We present a fair synchronization protocol (FSP) that enforces fairness and is more efficient than a lock-step scheme. The basic FSP protocol is susceptible to cheating. Therefore, we add a cheat prevention mechanism as an enhancement. We implement the enhanced protocol, the cheat proof protocol (CPP), in a simple game environment and deploy it on the PlanetLab. The results indicate that the CPP is effective in enforcing fairness while preventing cheating.
Keywords :
Internet; computer games; peer-to-peer computing; protocols; synchronisation; FSP protocol; PlanetLab; cheat prevention mechanism; cheat proof protocol; cheat proofing; decentralized online multiplayer games; fair synchronization protocol; game play fairness; lock step scheme; network latencies; Computer science; Cryptography; Delay; Operating systems; Peer to peer computing; Pipelines; Protection; Robustness; Scalability; Transport protocols;
Conference_Titel :
Network Computing and Applications, 2004. (NCA 2004). Proceedings. Third IEEE International Symposium on
Print_ISBN :
0-7695-2242-4
DOI :
10.1109/NCA.2004.1347803
