A PRIORITY UPDATING COMMUNICATIONS MODEL FOR NETWORKED VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS
Author(s):
Yang-wai Chow,
Ronald Pose ,
Matthew Regan
Paper abstract: The popularity and success of networked virtual environments in applications such as massively multiplayer online games has led to the development of very large-scale multi-user networked virtual environments. Such systems create virtual worlds where thousands of users, who might be physically located all over the globe, can interact together through the shared virtual environment. In order for users to collaborate and interact comfortably with one another, huge quantities of data have to be exchanged through the network so as to maintain consistency in the shared state of the virtual environment. The amount of data generated by these large-scale networked virtual environment systems place tremendous demands on the network, and limitations in terms of networking resources can degrade system performance by causing network congestions, which consequently result in message transmission delays. This in turn impedes user interaction, as these delays affect consistency in the shared state of the virtual environment. This paper investigates the implementation of a priority updating network communications model, designed to reduce the overall amount of network traffic and bandwidth utilization, whilst at the same time not greatly compromising on the real-time interactive nature of these large-scale multi-user virtual environments.
