Peer-Assisted Online Games with Social Reciprocity

Online games and social networks are cross-pollinating rapidly in today's Internet: online social network sites are deploying more and more games in their systems, while online game providers are leveraging social networks to power their games. An intriguing development as it is, the operational challenge in the previous game persists, i.e., the large server operational cost remains a non-negligible obstacle for deploying high-quality multi-player games. Peer-To-Peer based game network design could be a rescue, only if the game players' mutual resource contribution has been fully incentivized and efficiently scheduled.