Laurent Gautier

A distributed architecture for multiplayer interactive applications on the Internet

This article describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of MiMaze, a distributed multiplayer game on the Internet, and, more precisely, it describes the design of dedicated transmission control mechanisms. MiMaze is implemented on a completely distributed communication architecture based on the IP multicast protocol suite (RTP/UDP/IP). This is the first work to analyze a distributed interactive game on the multicast Internet. The major element of the MiMaze architecture is a distributed synchronization mechanism that guarantees the consistency of the game regardless of network delay. This article provides on evaluation of the MiMaze game on the MBone, and discusses approaches to monitor and evaluate this new type of application. The main contribution of this work is to show, based on on example, the feasibility of this new family of applications on a best-effort network. It is shown that real-time interactivity can be maintained, provided that some level of inconsistency can be tolerated by the application. This work also highlights the role of multicast as an enabling technology for a real-time Internet.

Design and evaluation of MiMaze a multi-player game on the Internet

This paper describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of MiMaze, a distributed multiplayer game on the Internet. The major contribution of this work is to have designed and implemented a completely distributed communication architecture based on IP multicast. MiMaze uses multicast communication system based on RTP/UDP/IP, and distributed synchronization mechanisms to guarantee the consistency of the game, regardless of network delay. This paper provides evaluation results on the Mbone.

ALFred, a protocol compiler for the automated implementation of distributed applications

This paper describes the design and the prototyping of a compiling tool for the automated implementation of distributed applications: ALFred. This compiler starts from the formal specification of an application written in ESTEREL and then integrates end-to-end communication functions tailored to the application characteristics (described in the specification); it finally produces a high performance implementation. The paper describes the communication architecture associated with the approach. The compiler consists of a control compiler, also called ALF compiler, and a data manipulation compiler (the ILP compiler) that combines data manipulation functions in an efficient way (the ILP loop). The ALFred compiler has been designed to allow the development and the analysis of non-layered high performance communication architectures based on ALF and ILP.