Bamboo - Supporting Dynamic Protocols For Virtual Environments
Kent Watsen, Michael Zyda · 1998
Distributed virtual environments enable interaction between participants using networking protocols. Historically, for lack of better methods, a single, all encompassing, highly enumerated protocol would be used. However, all entity expressions would be limited to just those having enumerations. Some more recent protocols enable dynamically enumerated objects using remote method invocation. Unfortunately, remote method invocation increases network traffic while delaying latency-critical interactions. This paper introduces another approach whereby the system dynamically downloads and installs client-specific networking protocols at runtime. This approach incurs longer object initialization while providing optimal runtime performance as the protocol can be specialized for the specific needs of that object. The reason that this approach has not yet been realized, until now, is due to the lack of a VE toolkit, like Bamboo, capable of supporting dynamic extensibility. This paper details how...