Providing Full Awareness to Distributed Virtual Environments Based on Peer-to-Peer Architectures

In recent years, large scale distributed virtual environments (DVEs) have become a major trend in distributed applications, mainly due to the enormous popularity of multiplayer online games in the entertainment industry. Since architectures based on networked servers seems to be not scalable enough to support massively multiplayer applications, peer-to-peer (P2P) architectures have been proposed as an efficient and truly scalable solution for this kind of systems. However, the main challenge of P2P architectures consists of providing each avatar with updated information about which other avatars are its neighbors. We have denoted this problem as the awareness problem. Although some proposals have been made, none of them provide total awareness to avatars under any situation. This paper presents a new awareness method based on unicast communication that is capable of providing awareness to 100% of avatars, regardless of both their location and their movement pattern in the virtual world...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: CGI
• Authors: Pedro Morillo, W. Moncho, Juan M. Orduña, José Duato
• Keywords: Awareness, CGI 2006, Computer Graphics, Large Scale, P2P Architectures