Area-Based Gossip Multicast

Ch. Seeger, B. Kemme, P. Kabus, A. Buchmann.

Abstract:

This paper presents areacast, a dynamic, area-based gossip multicast that enables a node to multicast messages only to nodes with a shared interest. This multicast can be used in multiplayer games where players want to send position updates, that is information that they have moved in the virtual game world, to players that reside close to them in the game world. As nodes continuously change their position the set of nodes in their neighborhood changes, too. areacast is able to handle this dynamism in a truly peer-to-peer fashion as each node keeps track of its current neighbors detecting new neighbors very fast. We evaluate our approach using game simulations where players either walk randomly in the game field or flock to a few hotspots. The results show that areacast is able to disseminate messages very fast to neighbors while not overloading the network.

Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games (NetGames), October 2008.