A Novel Method for Supporting Massively Multi-user Virtual Environments

Abstract

In collaborative distributed virtual environment people interact with each other to shard their states. In this paper we present massively multi-user virtual simulation architecture - MMVISA. The framework partitions the simulation platform into multiple regions to properly organize the decorative entities and to efficiently manage their association. The coordinator, the leader of a zone, manages local communications in multicast fashion but this multicast functionality is shifted from the network layer to the application layer to get the benefit of the scalability and easy deployability. Considering the behavior of the entities, coordinator opens multiple multicast channels to reduce structural reformation events among the entities. On the other hand, coordinators themselves form a top level mesh hierarchy to manage the area of interest. A mathematical model is given to determine the best node in the best zone with a given interest vector. This gives a provision to a node to import all the interesting messages when needed and makes it easy to be virtually there