Large scale distributed virtual environments (DVEs) have become a major trend in distributed applications, mainly due to the enormous popularity of multi-player online games in the entertainment industry. Since architectures based on networked servers seem to be not scalable enough to support massively multi-player applications, peer-to-peer (P2P) architectures have been proposed as an efficient and truly scalable solution for this kind of systems. However, in order to design efficient DVEs based on peer-to-peer architectures these systems must be characterized, measuring the impact of different client behaviors on system performance. This paper presents the experimental characterization of peer-topeer distributed virtual environments in regard to well-known performance metrics in distributed systems. Characterization results show that system saturation is inherently avoided due to the peerto-peer scheme, as it could be expected. Also, these results show that the saturation of a giv...
Silvia Rueda, Pedro Morillo, Juan M. Orduña