A dynamic management scheme for DVEs

Advances in computer technology and networking infrastructures in combination with advanced applications and services, have expanded the adoption of distributed virtual environments and promoted their use in a wide range of areas, such as learning and training, collaborative work, military applications and multiplayer online games. The characteristics and requirements of such DVEs differ significantly given the diverse objectives, scope and context that each virtual world aims at supporting. However, one common characteristic of DVEs is their dynamic state with users entering and leaving the system randomly, resulting in changes of the requirements for the DVE system. These changes require effective load distribution and management of the communication cost so that consistency is always maintained. This paper presents a dynamic management approach for DVEs driven by the diversity of different applications’ characteristics and requirements. This approach exploits the dynamic nature of these systems for selecting and assigning, on an on-demand basis, the resources necessary for the efficient operation of the system. The experiments conducted to validate the behavior of the approach illustrate that it can significantly minimize communication cost among the system servers together with effective workload distribution.