A Simulation Modelling Tool for Distributed Virtual

21 Distributed Virtual Environments simulate the behaviour and activities of a great number of users 22 interacting in a virtual world over a wide area network. The size of the virtual worlds and the 23 tremendous number of users that these environments are called to support require additional 24 bandwidth and computational resources. For supporting large-scale Distributed Virtual 25 Environments, extended infrastructure is needed in terms of both hardware and software. However, 26 both researchers and application designers do not always have access to such an extended 27 infrastructure and the assessment and evaluation of developed performance improvement techniques 28 becomes extremely difficult. To address this issue, this paper presents a simulation modelling tool, 29 called STEADiVE for networked servers Distributed Virtual Environments that could be used by 30 designers for evaluating the performance of their approaches under different scenarios and system 31 settings. The validation of the simulation modelling tool has showed that it achieves high accuracy in 32 representing a real DVE system. STEADiVE comes to fill in the gap in the area of simulation tools for 33 these systems. 34 35