A cheat controlled protocol for centralized online multiplayer games

ABSTRACT

Ordering of command messages from the clients at the game servers is an important issue that impacts fairness, response times, and smoothness of the game play. Recently, protocols based on "reaction" times were proposed to order the command messages. This paper presents a protocol that can be used to control cheating in reaction time based message ordering schemes. We examine the performance of the proposed protocol by emulating wide-area game play scenarios on the Planet-Lab. The results from the experiments indicate that the proposed protocol is able to dramatically reduce the cheating opportunities that exist for the clients.

REFERENCES

• 1: N. E. Baughman and B. N. Levine, "Cheat-proof playout for centralized and distributed online games," IEEE INFOCOM, 2001, pp. 104--113.
• 2: E. Cronin, B. Filstrup and S. Jamin, "Cheat-Proofing Dead Reckoned Multiplayer Games (Extended Abstract)," ADCOG 2003, Jan. 2003.
• 3: Katherine Guo , Sarit Mukherjee , Sampath Rangarajan , Sanjoy Paul, A fair message exchange framework for distributed multi-player games, Proceedings of the 2nd workshop on Network and system support for games, p.29-41, May 22-23, 2003, Redwood City, California [doi>10.1145/963900.963903]
• 4: The PlanetLab home page, 2004 http://www.planet-lab.org/.
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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.4 Distributed Systems
          Subjects: Distributed applications

General Terms:
Algorithms, Performance

Keywords:
cheat prevention, multiplayer online games, time cheating