Support for resilient Peer-to-Peer gaming

in areas such as Massively-Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), the conventional centralized server model does not scale with the sheer number of simultaneous clients that need to be supported. P2P architectures are increasingly being considered as replacements for traditional client-server architectures in MMOGs. A distributed P2P architecture that uses "Coordinator" nodes for handling smaller groups of players has been shown to be especially effective in supporting MMOGs. However, the drawback of moving from centralized to distributed architectures is the loss of control, and more specifically the increase in the vulnerability of the system as a whole to compromises. There has been no prior work on handling the specific case when the Coordinator itself is compromised and cheats, a scenario akin to cheating conducted by the network. We address this problem by proposing an architecture that is resilient to Coordinator compromises and demonstrate the effectiveness of this architecture. We believe that this is an essential step towards enabling a widespread deployment of P2P-based MMOGs. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.