An Interest Management Architecture by ALM and Region Partition for Large-Scale Distributed Virtual Environment

Large-Scale Distributed Virtual Environments (LSDVEs) must deal with the challenge of supporting a large number of users interacting on the Internet while keeping the communication among the parties synchronous and highly reactive. Interest Management is widely used to filter unnecessary messages in such systems. However, the lack of deployment of IP Multicasting over the Internet and other problems introduced by the division of virtual environment should be considered. We present an interest management architecture that supports a large number of users on the Internet by dividing the virtual environment into multiple adjacent hexagonal regions. In the architecture, messaging among entities is based on a multi-server communication infrastructure by the Application Layer Multicasting (ALM). And each region is mapped to an ALM tree with a master node constructing the overlay tree and managing nodes that lie in its region. The interest area of each entity is composed of two parts: the inner hexagon and outer hexagon. By the two parts, inter-region as well as intra-region interaction is supported to maintain a continuous view without increasing too much traffic. In addition, the buffer borderlines near the boundaries are introduced to reduce the number of connections and disconnections that occur when a node frequently moves at the boundary of the regions without affecting the messaging of the entities and modifying the partition structure.