Design of network protocols for distributed virtual environments

The explosive popularity of the Internet has given birth to research on distributed virtual environments (DVE). They aim at providing a shared application data environment at real-time for users participating in the same application session across the Internet. As more users join the session, and as more multimedia data are shared because of network resource limitation, it is more difficult to maintain the quality of DVE, i.e. the users' satisfaction level. Previous work mainly tried to solve the scalability, synchronization and data transport issues at the application level, with limited success. We suggest a new network centric solution, that consists of a novel network architecture and protocols upon which any large-scale DVE application can be easily developed. The performance of the proposed scheme, called GAIA, is verified by simulation.