Performance evaluation of a dynamic approach for networked servers distributed virtual environments

Distributed Virtual Environment systems simulate the behaviour and activities of a great number of concurrent users interacting in a virtual world over a wide area network. The advances both in computer technology and networking infrastructures in combination to the advanced applications and services developed, expanded the popularity of DVEs and promoted their use in a wide range of areas, such as learning and training, collaborative work, military applications and multiplayer online games. The sizes of the virtual worlds simulated and the tremendous number of users that DVEs are called to support require additional bandwidth and computational resources. For handling these growing requirements a lot of work has been done both to the direction of alternative architectural solutions as well as to techniques and algorithms for handling and overcoming the limitations of these environments. However, recent research has shown that one of the major limitations of networked servers DVE systems is scalability. To this direction this paper presents on the one hand a dynamic approach for DVEs, which exploits the nature of these systems for the optimal resource management and extended scalability support and on the other hand, evaluates its performance through a series of experiments and under various settings of the virtual world, using Simul8 simulation tool.