Mobile agent based large-scale collaborative virtual environment system

The scalability of the existing Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) systems is limited due to the constraints in computer processing power and network bandwidth. To address the scalability issues, we have developed a mobile agent-based large-scale CVE (LCVE) system to support a large number of concurrent participants in a CVE with a large amount of evolving virtual entities. In our approach, the system tasks/services are modeled as mobile agents, which are not bound to any fixed nodes as the traditional CVE architectures do. The mobile agents can migrate between different system nodes. Thus, nodes can be treated as a kind of system computing resource, which is independent of the services they provide. The mutual independence of services and nodes provides large freedoms for the LCVE system to utilize the Computing resource efficiently. Furthermore, any overloaded service mobile agent can autonomous reproduce itself and transfer the cloned one to the less-loaded nodes to share its workload, i.e. the communication architecture of the service will be extended autonomously at run-time to ensure the system scalability. This paper is an extension and refinement of our previous work to include our latest work in system prototype and experimental results of the proposed approach. Our experiment of the proposed architecture in supporting real-time interaction among 1000 concurrent users in LCVE demonstrated the effectiveness of our method.