Quicker re-allocation of regions in opensimulator framework
Umar Farooq, Ihsan Rabbi, Kashif Zia, Syeda Zohra Israr, Muneeba Shereen · 2018
Scalability is one of the major issues to cope with, in digital spaces, called virtual worlds, usually parallel and distributed in nature. In our previous work, we developed a framework for scaling these environments to cope with issues in static and dynamic methods already in use for scalability. It was implemented using the OpenSimulator framework, which switches-off a region before a transfer and brings it back after the successful re-allocation. The players in the transferring region are moved to an intermediate region during the transfer. Extended removal strategies for the OpenSimulator framework were developed that significantly reduced the time taken by the re-allocation process. In this work, we introduce parallel alternatives to the current sequential approaches for content load and players' transfer activities of the re-allocation process. The basic aim is to make the re-allocation process more faster. The extended mechanisms exploit the parallelism of the existing multi-core architectures by using parallel programming constructs of C# language. The evaluation results demonstrated improvement of the extended methods against the sequential approaches. The time needed to re-allocate a region is greatly reduced compared with existing methods, when the extended approaches are incorporated into the re-allocation process.