SALIENT: stochastic, adaptive latency improvement for event notification trees

A challenge in massively multiplayer online games is the need for game event information to be quickly disseminated to all participants. Because of the cost and scalability limitations of centralized servers, peer-to-peer technologies have been adopted in which peers serve both to reconcile conflicting actions and to relay the events to other peers. This manuscript introduces Stochastic, Adaptive Latency Improvement for Event Notification Trees (SALIENT), which provides a method for constructing and maintaining a peer-to-peer event notification tree. SALIENT is a distributed algorithm that uses a number of independent mechanisms that work over time to incrementally make improvements to the event notification tree. In random networks of various sizes, SALIENT was found to greatly reduce experienced latency, typically as much as 40-60% reduction in event delays. In addition, SALIENT has bandwidth management strategies that help avoid situations of bandwidth overload, allowing many more participants to participate despite limited participant bandwidth.