A simulation modelling tool for Distributed Virtual Environments

Distributed Virtual Environments simulate the behaviour and activities of a great number of users interacting in a virtual world over a wide area network. The size of the virtual worlds and the tremendous number of users that these environments are called to support require additional bandwidth and computational resources. For supporting large-scale Distributed Virtual Environments, extended infrastructure is needed in terms of both hardware and software. However, both researchers and application designers do not always have access to such an extended infrastructure and the assessment and evaluation of developed performance improvement techniques becomes extremely difficult. To address this issue, this paper presents a simulation modelling tool, called STEADiVE for networked servers Distributed Virtual Environments that could be used by designers for evaluating the performance of their approaches under different scenarios and system settings. The validation of the simulation modelling tool has showed that it achieves high accuracy in representing a real DVE system. STEADiVE comes to fill in the gap in the area of simulation tools for these systems. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.