A latency-adaptive communication architecture for inter-networked virtual environments

With the availability of broadband Internet Access, Networked Virtual Environment (NVE) is ready for deployment over the Internet. Of existing NVE communication architectures, the most suitable one for Inter-networked VE is client/server architecture with multi-server. However under this architecture each client connects with only one server, so when a client migrates from one server to another, it should disconnect with the previous server and make connection to another server. Because of the Internet's inherent latency problem, there will be an abrupt appearance in other clients' view due to it. To avoid this abrupt appearance, the paper bright out a new NVE's communication architecture in which each client connects with other server(s) in advance according to prediction. The new architecture was adopted by Tourism Expo'2003 of Zhejiang Province, and achieved a great success.