Scalability issues of dynamic space management for multiple-server networked virtual environments

This paper discusses the scalability issues of networked virtual environments (net-VEs). A most important problem of net-VEs is that the performance of the system is remarkably deteriorated when users increase in number. To solve this problem, we proposed two methods. The first method tries to equalize the load in each server by dynamically adjusting the size of the space managed by each server. The second method tries to reduce the amount of operations by changing the size of a management unit of the virtual space. To evaluate the proposed methods, we developed a multiple-server networked game called "CittaTron". Through several experiments, we show the effectiveness of our proposed method.