AN AUTONOMOUS DECENTRALIZED MULTI-SERVER FRAMEWORK FOR LARGE SCALE COLLABORATIVE VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS

Abstract

Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) is a promising technology which provides an online shared virtual world to the geographically dispersed people to interact with each other. However, the scalability of existing CVE system is limited due to the constraints in processing power and network speed of each participating host. Large scale CVE (LCVE) that supports a large number of concurrent participants and a large amount of evolving virtual entities is not easy to achieve. In this paper, an autonomous decentralized grid based mobile agent framework for large scale CVE — MACVE is proposed. In MACVE, LCVE software system is decomposed into a group of collaborative mobile agents, each of which is responsible for an independent system task. Agents can migrate or clone dynamically at any suitable participating host (grid node) include traditional servers and qualified user hosts to avoid bottleneck, which can improve the scalability of LCVE. Therefore, MACVE is a logically multi-server architecture while the server workload is autonomously decentralized. Our system prototype and evaluation has demonstrated the feasibility of the proposed framework.