Badumna: A decentralised network engine for virtual environments

Abstract

Many of today’s virtual environment applications, such as massively multiplayer online games, involve a large and rapidly changing set of users. The server-based architecture of these applications makes its hard for them to support the dynamic user base and provide a scalable solution. Badumna, a scalable network engine for large-scale virtual environments, was developed to address these issues. The approach is based on a decentralised architecture using a structured peer-to-peer network. In order to ensure a highly scalable and efficient design, Badumna uses techniques that include neighbour introductions and the formation of dynamic bounded regions to reduce the load on the peer-to-peer network. The performance of Badumna is evaluated using extensive simulations. Results indicate that Badumna is able to scale to a large number of users without placing any additional overheads on the network that degrade performance.