Evaluating loss-aware update mechanisms for distributed virtual environments

Abstract

Distributed virtual environment (DVE) enables multiple users from different regions of the world connecting together to interact and communicate with each other in a common virtual environment. Due to recent trends of raising popularity of massively multiplayer

online game and better internet infrastructure such as fiber optic, the usage of DVE has grown exponentially.However, there is still an issue of DVE being unable to project a visually consistent representation of the virtual world due to issues such as packet loss in the network, propagation delay in the network and client local clock asynchrony. One of the solutions to this problem is to implement Dead Reckoning (DR) system which will allow the clients to predict and extrapolate the next frame position base on the previous frame data. However, the quality of DR is still determined by the threshold value set. Therefore, the objective of this project is to evaluate and demonstrate how much better the naïve update algorithm and the compensation update algorithm will fare as both update algorithms will modify the threshold value by taking into account of possible network packet loss so that the playback will look visually as good as the condition where there is no network loss at all.