Message caching for local and global resource optimization in shared virtual environments

ABSTRACT

The use of Shared Virtual Environments is growing in areas such as multi-player video games, military and industrial training, and collaborative design and engineering. As a result, different mixes of computing power and graphics capabilities of the participating computers arise naturally as the variety of people/organizations sharing a virtual environment grows. This paper presents an adaptive mechanism to reduce bandwidth usage and to optimize the use of computing resources of heterogeneous computers mixes utilized in a shared virtual environment. The mechanism is based on caching of both outgoing- and incoming-messages. We also report the results of implementing the proposed scheme in a simple shared virtual environment.

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INDEX TERMS

Keywords:
Message Caching, Networking, Shared Virtual Environments, Virtual Reality