• Constant-Time Complexity Interest Management for Online Games

      Gallego, Francisco; Kumar, Pawan; Mehdi, Qasim; Bernab, Abel; Llorens, Faraon (The University of Wolverhampton, School of Computing and Information Technology, 2007)
      Data Distribution Management (DDM) services are very important to online services in general and, in particular, to online Computer Games. Many previous works have addressed the problemof minimizing bandwidth usage by avoiding sending unnecessary data to clients, which is often referred to as InterestManagement. Many good algorithms have been developed to calculate clients’ interests, having O(n2) complexity in worst case, but none of them have paid attention to the time dependencies of the data. In this paper we present a novel algorithm for Interest Management which reaches a O(1) complexity by profiting from time dependencies of data related to clients’ interests. Our results show that this approach improves previously existing ones in time performance, and it is specially suitable for its use in online computer game servers.
    • Content Adaptation and Shared State Distribution for Multiplayer Mobile Games

      Mehdi, Qasim; Kumar, Pawan; Salim, Aly; Bechkoum, Kamal (The University of Wolverhampton, School of Computing and Information Technology, 2006)
      Typically games on mobile devices are limited to standalone single player games that are not only simple but also are limited by the device capabilities on which they are being played. With the advancement of networking technology, mobile multiplayer games have started to evolve. Nevertheless, these games are played on homogenous devices that have limited functionality and performance. For performance, scalability and heterogeneity, it is important that mobile multiplayer games be played on heterogeneous devices and able to support large number of players for an immersive experience. This demands that players not only receive the content as quickly as possible but also the content be adapted to the device capabilities. Further as different devices have different computing capabilities; it seems reasonable to distribute resources dynamically among the mobile players’ devices so that the overall shared state is maintained in a consistent state. In this paper we highlight the issues related to multiplayer gaming on mobile devices and provide a proposal for content adaptation and shared state distribution for multiplayer games on mobile devices based on dynamic scripting approach
    • Recursive Interest Management For Online Games

      Kumar, Pawan; Mehdi, Qasim (The University of Wolverhampton, School of Computing and Information Technology, 2006)
      Performance and scalability in multi-player online games and distributed simulators mainly depends on the effectiveness of the deployed interest management schemes. These schemes aim at providing messagefiltering mechanisms that reduces the communication overheads. However, in order to do so, they incur computational costs that are quite significant and are not suitable for scalable real time systems. In this paper, a recursive algorithm for interest management is presented that can be applied for systems that use multi-dimensional routing spaces for interest management. The algorithm’s simulation shows that it is more efficient and scalable than existing approaches.