A genetic approach for adding QoS to distributed virtual environments

Distributed virtual environment (DVE) systems have been designed last years as a set of distributed servers. These systems allow a large number of remote users to share a single 3D virtual scene. In order to provide quality of service in a DVE system, clients should be properly assigned to servers taking into account system throughput and system latency. The latter one is composed of both network and computational delays. This highly complex problem is known as the quality of service (QoS) problem. In this paper, we study the implementation of a genetic algorithm (GA) for solving the QoS problem in DVE systems. Performance evaluation results show that, due to its ability of both finding good search paths and keeping diversity, this nature inspired technique can provide significantly better solutions than other heuristic methods while requiring shorter execution times. Therefore, the proposed implementation of GA search method can actually improve the QoS offered by DVE systems.