A Distributed Interest Management Scheme for Massively Multi-user Virtual Environments

Massively multi user virtual environment (MMVE) applications must deal with the challenge of update message exchange among a large set of nodes distributed over the Internet. Therefore design of scalable network protocols is a major concern in such large scale distributed architectures. Several approaches have been proposed to aid update exchange in MMVEs. Message localization has always been a key point in the design of such distributed network protocols. Area of Interest Management (AoIM) mainly deals with the issues related to the update message localization with respect to the user's interest. As the number of users in the virtual environment increases, update message localization becomes more important in order to prevent the transmission of a huge bulk of unnecessary updates to uninterested users. Therefore, scalable and efficient area of interest management is a crucial point in MMVE design. This paper introduces a new zone selection and distributed regional message filtering architecture for MMVE applications. We propose Delaunay tetrahedrization as a good way of virtual world partitioning due to several promising features. Moreover we propose the partitioning to be done with respect to barriers in order to reach a better performance through the filtering the updates that need not be propagated over the barriers. We will also introduce a distributed interest management protocol based on the previous partitioning technique. Our proposed distributed message dissemination approach is capable of providing the interested users with variable updates rate according to their required Level of Detail.