VON: a scalable peer-to-peer network for virtual environments

: The scalability of large-scale networked virtual environments (NVEs) suchastoday's Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) faces inherent limits imposed by the client-server architectures. We identify an emerging research direction that applies peer-to-peer (P2P) networks to realize more scalable and affordable NVEs. The central issue for P2P-based NVE (P2P-NVE) systems is to correctly and efficiently maintain the topology of all participating peers by solving the neighbor discovery problem. We also propose Voronoi-based Overlay Network (VON), a simple and efficient design that maintains the P2P topology in a fully-distributed, low-latency, and message-efficient manner. Simulation results show that by bounding the per-node resource consumption, VON can be fundamentally more scalable than existing methods while achieving high topology consistency and reliability.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2006
• Where: NETWORK
• Authors: Shun-Yun Hu, Jui-Fa Chen, Tsu-Han Chen
• Keywords: Neighbor Discovery Problem, NETWORK 2006, P2P Topology, Voronoi-based Overlay Network