Research
My research interests include distributed systems, specially large-scale distributed simulation of networked virtual environments. More specifically, my research is focused on decentralized network support for massively multiplayer online games, which brings a significant set of problems yet to solve, such as: synchronization and consistency among the many simultaneous players, load balancing when using a multi-server architecture using a geographically distributed system, latency minimization in scenarios where a powerful central server is not available and cheat detection and/or prevention.
I have been doing research in this area since the last year of my Bachelor course in Computer Science, when I was actively participating of the creation and development of the InGE game library and I was one of the main programmers of the We are the champignons game. My Bachelor thesis was on the topic of QoS for multiplayer games using wireless networks, such as IEEE 802.11. After that, during my Master course, I worked on the P2PSE project, whose objective was to create a peer-to-peer game architecture for massively multiplayer games, which we achieved.
My Master's thesis had as objective to create a decentralized multi-server architecture, where the server nodes were actually given by volunteers - therefore, presenting very limited resources to serve the game. I had several publication during my Master, whose focus was on saving network bandwidth from the servers, through a fine-tuned interest management scheme, and on balancing the load between the game server at the same time that a minimum inter-server communication was pursued, in order to save resources of the system and to minimize tha communication latency of the players.
In my PhD course, which is bein done at this moment, my objective is to create a decentralized multi-server architecture composed of volunteer nodes, and adding fault-tolerance to it. In a first moment, a crash-stop failure model is being considered, but the ultimate goal of my thesis is to create a system which is tolerant to byzantine faults - whose purpose is to minimize the cheating issue of decentralized multiplayer game architectures, while also covering faulty, but non-malicious, behaviors of the system.
