A Peer-to-Peer Message Exchange Scheme for Large-Scale Networked Virtual Environments

Massively multiplayer online games and other multi-user based networked applications are becoming a big business today. Such kind of technology has long been researched in the area called Networked Virtual Environments (Net-VE). With the recent deployment of broadband access technologies, the increase of the number of participants is putting pressure on the Net-VE systems. The conventional systems coped with the scalability problem by segmenting players onto multiple servers or multicast groups, limiting the number of users that could interact with each other. These schemes, however, force developers to invest enormous money on hardware and spend much time on building complex software systems. In this paper, we present a fully distributed communication protocol for large-scale networked virtual environments. As the entities in this scheme are directly connected to each other by unicast, no special infrastructure such as multicast or costly central servers is needed. Simulation results show that this architecture is scalable to the increase of the number of participants in the Net-VE system.