A Framework Model for DVEs using SIMUL8

Distributed Virtual Environment systems simulate the behaviour and activities of a great number of users interacting in a virtual world over a wide area network. The sizes of the virtual worlds and the tremendous number of users that DVEs are called to support require additional bandwidth and computational resources. For handling these growing requirements a lot of work has been done both to the direction of alternative architectural solutions as well as to techniques and algorithms for handling the limitations of these environments. For supporting large-scale DVEs, extended infrastructure is needed in terms of both hardware and software. However, both researchers and application designers do not always have access to such extended infrastructure and the assessment and evaluation of developed techniques becomes extremely difficult. To this direction, this paper presents a simulation modelling tool for networked servers DVEs that could be used by designers for simulating the performance of their approaches under different scenarios.