Distributed event delivery model for collaborative virtual simulations

Abstract

Networked Virtual Environments (NVEs) are computer generated, synthetic worlds that allow simultaneous interactions of multiple participants. IP multicast and application layer multicasting has been used for supporting collaborative virtual simulations. Recently many research work has focused on ways to partition this virtual space onto peer-to-peer overlay. The characters in these virtual environment, either human controlled or computer generated, need the state of the surrounding environment to decide their next move. However in doing so, they are interested in the state of virtual environment in a small area around them, called their Area of Interest (AoI). Thus when the virtual space gets partitioned across multiple sites, we need an efficient peer-to-peer communication model to get the surrounding state information that has been split across various sites. In this paper, we propose a low latency and low communication overhead distributed event delivery model that exploits the spatial and temporal locality of the information needed. The experimental results prove the efficacy of our solution