Balancing Workload and Communication Cost for

Recent advancement in computer graphics and inter-networking technologies enable researchers to experiment and build the distributed virtual environment (DVE) system. In general, a DVE system allows many clients to simultaneously explore a virtual world (which is a high resolution 3D environment representing a real life community) and at the same time, users in this virtual environment can interact with each other and can manipulate the objects in the virtual world. To implement such a system, there are many challenges that researchers have to face so as to build an eecient DVE system that can represent a large virtual world and at the same time, support large number of concurrent users. In this work, we present some of these important issues, such as the necessity to balance the workload among diierent servers as well as minimizing the inter-server communication. We show that the problem, in general, is NP-complete and we proposed several algorithms so as to nd the partitioning policy eeciently (both in terms of the partitioning cost and computational complexity). Experiments are carried out to illustrate the eeectiveness of our proposed algorithms.