A QoS model for collaboration through distributed virtual environments

Today's virtual environments are expected to be distributed to allow collaboration for common purposes. However, they must ensure a high level of Quality of Service (QoS) to the user, especially in an open context with unknown, a priori, man-in-the-loop event occurrence. This paper presents our Distributed Virtual Environment Collaboration Model (DVECOM) and its implementation which aims to provide an end-user QoS support for distributed virtual reality applications; This model aims to reconcile openness and real-time requirements for collaborative relationships using virtual environments. Real-time requirements ensure the logical synchronization between the displayed scenes of the same virtual world on a set of distributed machines. The DVECOM model is based partially upon COREMO concepts and further work done in the context of the Amusement European Esprit project. DVECOM integrates QoS provision and management. The major idea is to guarantee the consistency of scene rendering and the synchronization of the display from the user point of view. The other idea is to auto-adapt rendering in accordance with the retained strategy, ensuring best effort and least suffering virtual world rendering. Representation degradation is driven by the users' choices and is assisted by the system. The receiver-side protocol is based upon end-user preferences, physical level capability information, as well as pertinence of notification to each client (contextual end-user information). The model should be able to guarantee logical consistency and synchronization of virtual world distributed displays, with the least rendering degradation possible. When available, such guarantees would make it possible to use DVE out of a closed, oversized, very restricted context for industrial collaborative applications with an expected QoS. (C) 2000 Academic Press.