Enhancement of collaborative interest management mechanism for P2P networked virtual environment

Abstract

Interest Management (IM) aims at eliminating irrelevant state updates transmitted in Networked Virtual Environment (NVE), such as online games. The existing IM mechanisms include area-based, cell-based mechanisms and hybrid IM mechanism which reduces the communication overhead by utilizing the cell-based mechanism to reduce Area-Of-Interest (AOI) updates in the area-based mechanism. Comparing to the existing IM mechanisms, the recently proposed collaborative IM mechanism (CIM) successfully reduces the communication cost further. However, two problems exist in the current CIM mechanism: i) the protocol may fail under certain circumstances, and ii) the protocol requires dividing the virtual environment into fixed grids. In this paper, we focus on the approaches that could enhance the current CIM mechanism and we will evaluate the performance using simulation of multiplayer game scenarios.