Game Server Replication in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

Mobile devices are gaining popularity, and it is expected that the number of mobile devices will grow even more in the next few years. An increasing percentage of these devices has sufficient processing resources to be used as game clients. Another point is that multiplayer games have become very popular lately.

Mobile ad hoc networks are networks without any fixed network infrastructure. They are gaining much interest in research as well as in industry. With ad hoc network mechanisms, clients which are in sufficiently close proximity are able to communicate directly without the need of further, externally provided, infrastructure.

For games, the commonly used client-server architecture is not well-suited when playing in mobile ad hoc networks because it lacks the redundancy to deal with mobile players. Therefore, we developed a redundant zone-based server architecture which copies the game status to multiple servers that are in the vicinity of participating clients. But introducing game server redundancy comes at the price of replication and consistency problems. Game data from one servers needs to be communicated to all the other servers in an efficient way.

In this master thesis we will study the structure of game data at the server and how they can be efficiently communicated to the other servers. A game-independent middleware will be implemented to assist game applications in the replication of game data and ensures consistency between the servers. This work takes the problems of mobile networks into considerations.

• Additional information by Tomas Purzycki