A Performance Evaluation of a Persistent World Manager Protocol to Support Mobile Collaborative Virtual Environment

Many protocols have been proposed to improve persistency and data availability in Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs). Two approaches have been proposed in the literature. Structured peer-to-peer network such as a distributed hash table (DHT) while the other approach uses an unstructured peer-to-peer network. With the rapidly increasing use of personal mobile devices, we are facing new opportunities and challenges in providing persistency for Mobile Collaborative Virtual environment (MCVE) applications. Our research examines the issues involved in Gnutella network deployments for mobile environments when these environments establish a persistent world. In this paper, we demonstrate how persistency can be integrated with a replication protocol in order to implement a successful MCVE system. The resulting approach limits the broadcast nature of the Gnutella network in order to offer a realistic virtual environment.