Interest-driven avatar neighbor-organizing for P2P transmission in distributed virtual worlds

Abstract

The neighbor table/distributed hash table (DHT) is used to choose the data supplier for data-dispatching services in distributed virtual environments based on peer-to-peer networks. It is essential that a stable and efficient neighbor table/DHT be maintained. Because the avatar has much freedom to roam, the spatial distribution of nodes is not uniform, and the logical topology may change dramatically. Therefore, traditional construction mechanisms, such as the neighbor-discovery mechanism based on spatial distance or DHT, may involve fierce churn in the neighbor table and frequent message exchanges. In this paper, we proposed a dynamic node-organizing mechanism that aims to solve these challenging problems by applying the avatar's behavioral characteristics to the neighbor maintenance mechanism and scene data transmission. First, we have summarized the common social behaviors of avatars and extracted their characteristics. We then propose an interest-similarity measuring algorithm to divide the node into diverse clusters. Next, we measure the cluster stability in terms of interest entropy while constructing a stable neighbor mesh for each node in a cluster. We have conducted extensive simulation experiments that simulate avatar behaviors in a popular massively multiplayer online game. The results show that our proposed mechanism achieved a substantial alleviation of neighbor churn and reduced information exchange, which improves the transmission efficiency in distributed virtual environments. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.