A totally ordered and secure multicast protocol for distributed virtual environment

Sharing a virtual space by many users, a Distributed Virtual Reality Environment (DVE) provides the high level communication and cooperative design facilities. For the large scaled DVE in the wide area network, a reliable and efficient multicast protocol on the Internet is necessary We have developed a reliable multicast protocol based on the sequence server and evaluated with simulation. From our simulation result, our protocol is more scalable than RMP (Reliable Multicast Protocol). However, the protocol has an obvious drawback that the ordering cost is centralized to the sequence server. Therefore, the scalability and extensibility is limited. Furthermore, security support is not provided. It is important matter for the reality of the DVE system. In this paper, we propose the method to distribute the workload to some servers to make the protocol scalable and extensile. From our simulation result, the message arrival time to members are extremely reduced. Also, we propose the key distribution mechanism for the secure multicast communication.