A network-centric approach to enhancing the interactivity of large-scale distributed virtual environments

In Distributed Virtual Environments (DVEs), where many simultaneous human users interact with each other in a shared, 3D virtual world, enhancing interactivity is of crucial importance, since the success of a DVE greatly depends on users’ perceptions. In general, enhancing interactivity for large-scale DVEs with thousands of geographically distributed users faces various challenges such as large Internet latencies, high resource demands and high potential of security threats. In this paper, we propose a network-centric approach to enhance the interactivity of DVEs by directly minimizing the network latencies in client–server communications. We consider two key problems: the server placement problem and the client assignment problem. We have formulated these two problems and proved that they are both NP-hard. We then adapt and develop several degree-based server placement approaches and greedy client assignment algorithms. Extensive simulation studies using realistic models have shown that our approach is very effective in enhancing the interactivity of large-scale DVEs. 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.