Adaptable client-server architecture for mobile multi-player games

International audienceMost of the multiplayer games available online are based on a client-server architecture because this architecture gives better administration control to the game providers. Besides controlling the account and payment information of the players, this architecture also prevents players from cheating as all the game logic is executing on the centralized server. We proposed a server assisted approach for mobile games in [2]. However, because of the varying and high latency of wireless networks and of the changing consistency requirements during the game play, it is difficult to keep the user experience highly interactive in client-server architecture. This paper presents an adaptive hybrid client-server architecture which changes its behavior according to network and game environment variations to improve game state consistency across different mobile terminals. The server applies consistency mechanism on its side, as in the traditional client-server architecture and dynamically switches to apply a client side consistency mechanism when inconsistencies occur at the client side because of the change in network conditions and/or game requirements. We have evaluated our approach on a car racing game. The results show that we can obtain an improved global consistency under a high and varying latency network using our dynamically adaptable approach