An Adaptive Interest Management Scheme for Limited Available Multicast Groups in Virtual Environments

Massively Multiplayer Games (MMGs) is an attractive example of virtual environment applications on the Internet. In such application, a great deal of update messages will be introduced, and thus consume a large amount of network bandwidth and multicast addresses. Interest Management (IM) is a mechanism provided for diminishing the redundant communication traffics. In this paper, based on the well-known cell-based grouping technique, we propose a flexible scheme, termed as consolidate-based grouping, to effectively decrease the superfluous message rate, and adaptively match the limitation on the number of available multicast addresses. In our approach, two phases are included. Initially, the virtual environment is first partitioned into much more smaller cells, than those were obtained from the traditional cell-based grouping strategy, to largely reduce the superfluous messages. In the second phase, we apply a merging technique to inversely combine some similar neighbouring cells to match the constraint on the number of available multicast addresses. Simulation results show that, in most cases, our proposed grouping technique can conduct about 10% reductions on the superfluous message rate, compared to the conventional cell-based grouping strategy, at the same condition.