On the characterization of distributed virtual environment systems

Abstract

Distributed Virtual Environment systems have experienced a spectacular growth last years. One of the key issues in the design of scalable and cost-effective DVE systems is the partitioning problem. This problem consists of efficiently assigning clients (3-D avatars) to the servers in the system, and some techniques have been already proposed for solving it. In this paper, we propose the correlation of the quality function proposed in the literature for solving the partitioning problem with the performance of DVE systems. Since the results show an absence of correlation, we also propose the experimental characterization of DVE systems. The results show that the reason for that absence of correlation is the non-linear behavior of DVE systems with the number of avatars in the system. Also, the results show that workload balancing mainly has an effect on system throughput, while minimizing the amount of inter-server messages mainly has an effect on system latency. © Springer-Verlag 2003.