Network-Aware Server Placement for Highly Interactive Distributed Virtual Environments
DS-RT '08 Proceedings of the 2008 12th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Distributed Simulation and Real-Time Applications
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Distributed Virtual Environments (DVEs) allow many simultaneous human users to interact with each other in shared, 3D virtual worlds. The interactivity of a DVE is of crucial importance, as its success greatly depends on users' perceptions when interacting within the virtual world. In this paper, different from traditional application-centric approaches like dead reckoning, we propose a network-centric approach to enhance the interactivity of DVEs by directly reducing the network latencies in client-server communications. We consider a key problem with this approach, termed the server placement problem. Generally, this problem concerns how to place servers in the network to reduce clientserver communication latencies. We then suggest several degree-based server placement approaches. Extensive simulation studies using realistic models have shown that appropriate server placement is very effective in enhancing the interactivity of large-scale DVEs.