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Controlling entity state updates to maintain remote consistency within a distributed interactive application

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Published:14 October 2009Publication History
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Abstract

One of the ongoing challenges for Distributed Interactive Applications (DIAs) is balancing the quality of service delivered to the end user with the operational costs involved. In particular the resultant network traffic should be minimized without affecting the end user experience where possible. This article proposes the use of remote feedback as a method of maintaining a desired consistency level within a peer-to-peer DIA. Though many existing techniques attempt to maintain consistency within a DIA, they operate in an open-loop manner and do not take error introduced into the system due to transmission delay into consideration. The goal of the work presented in this article is to transform this open-loop scheme into a closed-loop control system utilizing feedback from the remote users. By incorporating remote error into the systems update paradigm, the Protocol Data Unit (PDU) transmission rate can be dynamically altered to reflect changing network conditions. The performance of the resultant closed-loop control system is presented within.

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