Networking Issues for 3D Medical Collaborative Virtual Environments: Design and Applications

Abstract

Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) are Virtual Reality (VR) systems and can simulate medical procedures such as surgeries performed by a group of remote users which can interact with one another through the simulation in real-time, with the aid of a network such as the Internet.Therefore, it is important to note that research on CVE-specific networking issues allows us to better understand the requirements for real-time applications. This paper discloses design and implementation issues of a peer-to-peer multicast architecture on the collaborative module of theCyberMed VR framework, aiming at providing better network scalability, as well as it shows as results, some developed applications as validation. Finally, we compared the performance of the newly implemented peer-to-peer multicast architecture with the peer-to-peer unicast previously existent with simulated models designed with OPNET Network Modeler and R statistical software. As result of our experiments, the null hypothesis was rejected (p = 2.2e-16, level of significance = 5%) confirming what we expected about the behavior of CyberMed’s multicast protocol.