Analyzing Virtual World Region Fidelity on Scalability and Simulation Performance

Abstract

Virtual world simulation offers tremendous potential opportunities to improve, and optimize, in-dividual and collective echelon training for the military. The US Army Research Laboratory (ARL) Military Open Simulator Enterprise Strategy (MOSES) project's charter is to investigate simula-tion-based training technology for use in military specific training domains. Of particular interest are attributes of virtual worlds such as geographically distributed large-scale trainee support. We have initiated a series of experiments to determine appropriate benchmarks for simulator per-formance and to determine appropriate independent variables in order to create a robust predic-tive model that will enable virtual world training scenario designers to calculate, a priori, the number of trainees that may synchronously operate in a virtual world. The present paper's pur-poses were to determine the effect that virtual world region fidelity had on server performance and determine whether this independent variable would be appropriate for inclusion into our predictive model. We found that region fidelity had a statistically significant effect on the simula-tor's processor memory usage but had no significant effect on the simulator's vertical scalability, CPU usage nor network performance. In this paper, we discourse on the purpose of this research, our experimental methodology and results, and discuss the significance of our findings.