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SPEX: scalable spatial publish/subscribe for distributed virtual worlds without borders

Published:19 March 2014Publication History

ABSTRACT

Existing architectures designed to host large-scale virtual environments (VEs) use a variety of approaches, but they often limit the interaction range with other users or with the VE. How densely users can populate a given region is also limited by the hosting machine's CPU or bandwidth resources. We are motivated to remove such restrictions and present SPEX, an infrastructure that supports scalable spatial publish/subscribe for VE applications. SPEX is scalable and fault-tolerant, with adaptive load balancing and low latency as its key features. It is designed for the state and overlay management in VEs with many concurrent users. We evaluate a practical SPEX implementation within Amazon's EC2 Cloud and present a feasible approach to supporting 750 users across a continent with low latency, opening the possibility for hosting fast-paced games (e.g., first-person shooters) or applications on a large-scale.

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              cover image ACM Conferences
              MMSys '14: Proceedings of the 5th ACM Multimedia Systems Conference
              March 2014
              323 pages
              ISBN:9781450327053
              DOI:10.1145/2557642

              Copyright © 2014 ACM

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              Publication History

              • Published: 19 March 2014

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              MMSys '14 Paper Acceptance Rate15of57submissions,26%Overall Acceptance Rate176of530submissions,33%

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