Budget based dynamic state update aggregation

Abstract

Distributed Virtual Environments (DVEs) can handle large numbers of participants by optimizing the routing of state update messages sent to the computer of the individual participant. Often Area of Interest (AoI) management is used to limit the information an avatar can observe and thus the necessary state update messages that are sent to the client which the avatar represents.If the avatars are roughly evenly distributed through out the virtual environment, AoI enables the support for very large numbers of participants. But once a sufficient number of avatars gather in a small area of the virtual space, communication overhead grows on a n 2 scale as they observe each other.Instead on optimizing the overall number of messages, we limit the number of messages sent to a single client. We propose a novel approach to dynamically aggregate state update messages. It can support a very high numbers of avatars in restricted spaces. We decouple the management of the global state of the DVE from amount of detail sent to the client. Our approach exploits information about the specific DVE and its current state to maximize the ratio of bandwidth reduction to state update fidelity. It is intended to provide rich user experience for clients that connect via limited network links, like mobile users or consumer grade DSL.