A virtualization-based approach for zone migration in distributed virtual environments

  • Authors:

  • Duong N. B. Ta;Thang Nguyen;Tran Nguyen;Nguyen Do;Xueyan Tang;Wentong Cai;Suiping Zhou

  • Affiliations:

  • Nanyang Technological University, Singapore;Nanyang Technological University, Singapore;Nanyang Technological University, Singapore;Nanyang Technological University, Singapore;Nanyang Technological University, Singapore;Nanyang Technological University, Singapore;Teesside University, Middlesbrough, UK

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 4th International ICST Conference on Simulation Tools and Techniques
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

This paper deals with the zone migration problem in large-scale distributed virtual environments (DVEs), e.g., massively multi-player online games, distributed military simulations, etc. To support real-time interactions among thousands of concurrent, geographically separated clients, a distributed server architecture is generally needed. In such architecture, the large virtual world can be partitioned into multiple smaller zones, enabling load distributions or zone-to-server mappings to improve interactivity. For example, a zone might be mapped (assigned) to a server location near most of its clients to reduce network latency. In this paper, we consider the problem of live zone migration over wide area networks (WANs) to support DVE zone re-mapping or load re-distribution in a geographically distributed server infrastructure. We propose a virtualization-based zone migration approach, and develop several migration algorithms to effectively migrate multiple DVE zones. We have implemented the proposed migration approach and algorithms in a tool for DVE performance enhancement and monitoring. Extensive experiments have also been conducted with an online multi-player game prototype constructed using the Torque 3D game engine. The results demonstrate the feasibility of our migration approach.