Managing Scalability and Load Distribution for Large Scale Virtual Worlds

The traditional client-server approaches for handling Virtual Environments (VEs) have greatly been changed due to the significant increase in their popularity. Scalability was among the basic goals for the development of distributed and multi-server infrastructures. It is generally achieved by splitting a VE into different isolated partitions, and simulated with a set of dedicated servers. However, the concept of partitioning introduces key consistency and load balancing issues. The literature shows a number of mechanisms targeting scalability, consistency, and load distribution, however, these have major performance issues when used for highly interactive social and collaborative environments. These environments are termed virtual worlds that allow users to live their lives according to their desire. This paper presents our proposed hierarchical infrastructure named JoHNUM for the development of scalable and consistent virtual worlds [1]. Simulation results show that it performs better than similar mechanisms. It also provides our proposed load distribution algorithm based on aggregation of regions emphasizing on fair distribution of load while obtaining regular and contiguous areas for assignments [2]. The evaluation results demonstrate that it works well with small, medium, and large scale environments. The use of proposed strategies for load balancing algorithm are validated with a simple communication model [3]. Our future work includes the investigation of consistency issue. We have selected WorldForge [4] for the implementation of proposed ideas by extending its existing client-server environment to a distributed one [5].