As more games of a wider variety of genres move online to provide multiplayer experiences to their players, there is an increasing need to improve the quality of service delivered to the players of these games. Players tend to have the same performance and consistency expectations of their online multiplayer games as they do of their single player games, without realizing the issues and problems introduced by networking their games together. This results in a tremendous challenge for developers of networked games, because issues such as latency work strongly against meeting the needs of players. In this paper, we discuss the concept of optimistic execution to help game developers mask or hide the effects of latency in their networked games. We introduce the notion of optimistic execution, present our work in this area, dubbed New HOPE, and comment on its ability to assist game developers in this important area. Read more...

As mobile devices and wireless networks are becoming ubiquitous, the interest of users to deploy real-time applications, e.g. online gaming or Voice-over-IP in such environments is also increasing. Due to the difference between traditional and wireless networks, in particular in terms of available bandwidth and network structure, the concepts used for supporting real-time applications in both networks are different. This paper gives an overview of the key technical challenges that are fundamental and need to be solved in order to easily support real-time applications in wireless and mobile environments. In a first step, issues related to service provisioning in mobile networks are discussed. This is followed by a look at the Quality of Service supported by wireless networks and possible techniques for improving it. Finally, concepts for securing the communication between the users of real-time applications in wireless and mobile networks are presented. For each of these issues, we provide a detailed analysis and an overview of the state-of-the-art. Moreover, we illustrate the main points using distributed online games as an example. Read more...