Reducing Migration Latency for Distributed Virtual Environments by Mediation

Abstract

To achieve the scalability, which is one of important research topics on the distributed virtual environment (DVE), the seamless architecture is usually used. In a seamless game world, a player may be unknowingly interacting with objects that are actually being controlled by multiple game processes or servers. The game world is divided into several small pieces and managed by a cluster of game servers. Despite the efforts of developers, gamers are suffered from huge message traffic which comes from the chatting between gamers and the rendering of scene. This paper presents a method for the reducement of migration latency between game servers. Usually, message traffic reaches the peak when a player character is willing to move and is moving to other field server. MigAgent, introduced in this paper, mediates this kind of gamers to minimize traffic and to prepare for unexpected situation.