Performance improvement of Distributed Virtual Environments by exploiting objects’ attributes

Abstract

Distributed virtual environments need to address issues related to the control of network traffic, resource management, and scalability. Given the distributed nature of these environments, the main problems they need to overcome are the efficient distribution of workload among the servers and the minimization of the communication cost. In this direction, a lot of work has been done and numerous relevant techniques and algorithms have been proposed. The majority of these approaches mainly focus on user entities and their interactions. However, most of actual DVE systems include additional and non-dynamic elements, denoted as objects, whose presence can affect users’ behavior. This paper introduces virtual objects’ attributes and proposes two approaches that exploit these attributes in order to handle workload assignment and communication cost in DVE systems. Both approaches take into account scenario-specific aspects of DVE systems, such as the impact that entities’ attributes have on each other and the way this impact can affect the system’s state. These scenario-specific aspects are then combined with quantitative factors of the system, such as workload, communication cost, and utilization. The experiments conducted in order to validate the behavior of the proposed approach show that the incorporation of object’s presence can improve the DVE system’s performance. More specifically, objects’ presence and their attributes can assist in the significant reduction in the communication cost along with effective workload distribution among the system’s servers.