Tracking-needless grouping: an efficient and scalable grouping scheme in networked virtual environments

In a networked virtual environment (NVE), participants exchange their information on the network by sending messages. When a message is generated, usually only part of the entities are interested in it, so it would be superfluous to other entities. In order to reduce the wastefulness of bandwidth, the system always employs a grouping scheme to divide the entities into groups and only sends messages to the groups that would be interested in them. In this paper, we describe two well-known grouping strategies: entity-based grouping and cell-based grouping, and propose the tracking-needless grouping strategy for reducing the overhead of message sending. The simulation results show that it facilitates designing an efficient and scalable NVE system. Finally, we evaluate the influence of cell size on two aspects: grouping overhead and bandwidth requirement.