A self-organized resource allocation scheme for decentralized distributed virtual environments

Abstract

With the growth of Massively Multiuser Virtual Environments (MMVEs) and increasingly interactive social net working platforms, it is widely accepted that their convergence renders today's centralized hosting approaches impracticable. To handle virtual environments of such massive scale, decentralized systems are necessary that also involve the resources of clients. The expedient design of techniques enabling this kind of next-generation decentralized distributed virtual environments (DDVEs) is a growing field of research. In the HyperVerse project, we aim at the provision of an infrastructure enabling such DDVEs, focusing on collaboration and self-organization as means to achieve a maximum degree of scalability. In this paper we present a self-organized resource allocation scheme for DDVEs functioning independent of the underlying P2P network topology. Exploiting the heterogeneity of clients and utilizing locally available information only, it helps alleviate the load imposed by regions with a high user density as they often occur in such environments. Evaluations show that both for the discovery of these regions and their alleviation the local views converge fast to a global one, with favorable effects on the overlay topology.