Fast Synchronization of Mirrored Game Servers: Outcomes from a Testbed Evaluation

The deployment of online games over the Internet encompasses the use of novel, smart strategies able to guarantee, on one side, a high level of responsiveness in the game system and, one the other side, the consistency of the computed game state. The use of mirrored game state servers has been recognized as a scalable, fault tolerant architectural solution for the support of Multiplayer Online Games (MOGs). We have devised and developed a new optimistic synchronization scheme that exploits the notion of obsolescence and correlation among game events to speed up the synchronization among replicated servers, while maintaining the consistency of the game state. In this work, we discuss issues concerned with a real implementation of a mirrored game server architecture, deployed over the Internet, that exploits our synchronization algorithm. Specific attention is devoted to the experimental assessment. Results show the viability and the efficacy of our approach for the support of MOGs.