ATLAS: A Scalable Network Framework for Distributed Virtual Environments

Abstract

A distributed virtual environment (DVE) is a software system that allows users in a network to interact with each other by sharing a common view of their states. As users are geographically distributed over large networks like the internet and the number of users increases, scalability is a key aspect to consider for real-time interaction. Various solutions have been proposed to improve the scalability in DVE systems but they are either focused on only specific aspects or customized to a target application. In this paper, we classify the approaches for improving scalability of DVE into five categories: communication architecture, interest management, concurrency control, data replication, and load distribution. We then propose a scalable network framework for DVEs, ATLAS. Incorporated with our various scalable schemes, ATLAS meets the scalability of a system as a whole. The integration experiences of ATLAS with several virtual reality systems ensure the versatility of the proposed solution.

Strategies and Challenges to Facilitate Situated Learning in Virtual Worlds Post-Second Life

“…The most important issues are scalability, data privacy, integrity, and users' availability. The main strategies to resolve this are efficient data replication with concurrency control and interest management and by implementing self-healing processes for a fault-tolerant communication architecture [Lee et al 2002].…”

Hybrid load balancing for online games

“…We will explain this problem in Section 3. In [Lee03,Lee07], a method is proposed to extend [Ng02] to include additional servers for load redistribution. An overloaded server will first look at its neighbor servers to see if it may transfer all its extra loads to its neighbors.…”

On Consistency and Network Latency in Distributed Interactive Applications: A Survey—Part I

“…These reflect the diverse applications of this paradigm and the different research emphasis of each research group: shared workspaces, networked games, distributed whiteboards, group editors, distributed architectural design, education, telemedicine and simulations (Bhola, Banavar and Ahamad 1998;Sun, Jia, Zhang, Yang and Chen 1998;Bouras, Hornig, Triantafillou and Tsiatsos 2001;Fujimoto 2001;Riva and Gamberini 2001;Tawfik and Fernando 2001;McCoy, Delaney and Ward 2003;Frecon 2004). Several research teams have developed experimental distributed virtual environment platforms; some examples include RING (Funkhouser 1995), NPSNET (Macedonia, Zyda, Pratt, Barham and Zeswitz 1994;Capps, McGregor, Brutzman and Zyda 2000), MASSIVE (Greenhalgh and Benford 1995;Greenhalgh, Purbick and Snowdon 2000), PaRADE (Roberts, Sharkey and Sandoz 1995;, SPLINE (Barrus, Waters and Anderson 1996), CAVERNSoft (Leigh, Yu, Schonfeld, Ansari, He et al 2001), VELVET (de Oliveira and Georganas 2002), PARADISE (Holbrook, Singhal and Cheriton 1995;Singhal 1996), DIVE (Frécon and Stenius 1998;Frécon 2003;Frécon 2004), QUICK (Capps 2000), VPark (Joslin, Molet, Thalmann, Esmerado, Thalmann et al 2001), MOVE (Garcia, Montala, Pairot, Rallo and Skarmeta 2002), ATLAS (Lee, Lim and Han 2002), EQUATOR (MacColl, Millard, C. and Steed 2002) and PING (Roberts 2004). …”