Kiwano: A scalable distributed infrastructure for virtual worlds

In today's virtual worlds, even in the massively multi-player games, the number of avatars together in a virtual place barely reaches thousands. Regarding the billions of users dwelling the web, this is astonishingly low. In this paper we identify spatial indexation as the bottleneck that impedes scalability and we propose Kiwano, a distributed system to scale up to millions and more. In order to split the load, Kiwano dynamically divides the space in zones, each having a server maintaining a spatial index of all moving objects within the zone. This allows to timely compute which objects are in the neighborhood of any avatar. Thus, knowing its immediate environment, the client is able compute the local scene.