Distributed avatar management for Second Life

Abstract

Second Life (SL) is currently the most popular social virtual world, i.e., a digitalization of the real world where avatars can meet, socialize and trade. SL is managed through a Client/Server (C/S) architecture with a very high cost and limited scalability. A scalable and cheap alternative to C/S is to use a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) approach, where SL users rely only on their own resources (storage, CPU and bandwidth) to run the virtual world. We develop a SL client that allows its users to take advantage of a P2P network structured as a Delaunay overlay. We compare the performance of a P2P and C/S architecture for Second Life, executing several instances of our client over Planetlab and populating a SL region with our controlled avatars. Avatar mobility traces collected in SL are used to drive avatar behaviors. The results show that P2P improves user experience by about 20% compared to C/S (measured in term of consistency). Avatar interactivity is also 5 times faster in P2P than in C/S.