Occlusion Based Message Dissemination Method in Networked Virtual Environments
Kari Vatjus-Anttila, Timo Koskela, Séamus Hickey, Jarkko M. Vatjus-Anttila · 2013
Virtual spaces that host hundreds or even thousands of users create enormous amounts of traffic, which usually is broadcasted to the entire environment and congests the network medium very quickly. In this paper, a novel interest management (IM) algorithm called EA3is presented and evaluated. EA3is based on an existing IM algorithm, called A3which uses euclidean distance to discover entities of interest. A3was improved by utilizing a ray visibility algorithm, which helps to filter out traffic originating from entities behind obstacles. The evaluation of EA3and A3was conducted using an extensible networked virtual environment called real tend. The results show that, when either EA3or A3is used, the overall network throughput can be lowered significantly. In a city-like test scene, the drop was approximately 50 per cent with A3and 62 per cent with EA3compared to the situation when no IM algorithm was used. In terms of CPU load EA3is slightly heavier to use when there is a lot of open space inside the virtual environment.