Client allocation for enhancing interactivity in Distributed Virtual Environments

Abstract

Distributed Virtual Environments (DVEs) are distributed systems that allow multiple geographically distributed clients to interact concurrently in a shared virtual world. In practice, a multi-server architecture is usually employed as the communication architecture for DVEs, and the virtual world is partitioned into several zones to distribute the load among servers. A new problem, termed client allocation, arises when assigning the participating clients to servers. Current approaches usually assign clients to servers according to the locations of clients in the virtual world, i.e., clients interacting in a zone will be assigned to the same server. However, if the network delay from a client to its assigned server is large, the interactivity of the application may be greatly degraded. In this paper, we formulate the client allocation problem, and propose some allocation algorithms to assign clients to servers in DVEs in a more efficient way, taking into account both the virtual locations of clients and the network delays between clients and servers. Simulation results show that our algorithms are effective in enhancing the interactivity of DVEs. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.