A session server architecture for mobile distributed virtual environments

The widespread use of mobile phones and the ubiquity of the Internet are paving the way for an increased use of distributed virtual environments such as multiplayer games over wireless networks. The traditional architectures for such systems are not good enough to provide fairness and consistency to mobile users because of the high latency and frequent disconnections in wireless networks. Also it is not trivial to provide a central control over the game, as usually preferred by many game companies, without compromising the scalability of the game services. In this paper, we suggest a hybrid game architecture that maintains centralized control over the game while maintaining a good playability level of the game in case of frequent disconnections and user mobility. Our proposed approach has a centralized server related to the administrative control and several game session servers geographically spread; the game users are connected to the nearby session server for playing the game. A mimicking engine is put in action in case of disconnection. We present some evaluation results concerning the impact of a disconnection and show that our approach allows for session continuity after some reasonable reconfiguration time.