Dynamic Grid-Based Interest Management for Distributed Virtual Environments

In large-scale distributed virtual environments, simulated entities maintain a consistent virtual world by exchanging messages about their state information in a timely fashion. The problem of Interest Management (IM) or, as it sometimes appears in the literature, Data Distribution Management (DDM), is the problem of delivering to each entity only the data updates that it absolutely requires to maintain a consistent view of the virtual world. Efficient and effective interest management is crucial to the performance and scalability of distributed virtual environments. Several approaches have appeared in the literature to address the interest management problem. In this paper we focus mainly on Grid-based interest management in the context of the High-level Architecture (HLA) standard and develop a model that dynamically adapts the grid layout to match the changing distribution of entities in the virtual space. We also discuss a hierarchical approach that exploits the structure of the underlying network to further enhance the system’s traffic filtering capability.