Internet-Based Collaborative Virtual Simulations with Area of Interest Management

IP multicast is typically used to support message transmission among entities in collaborative virtual simulations running on Intranets, specially military training simulations. But, IP Multicast is mostly not available on the Internet. Alternatively, researches have in recent years proposed the use of Application Layer Multicasting techniques (ALM) to alleviate this problem and to allow a somewhat scalable message passing among peers in a group of users on the Internet. As the number of users grows in the session, efficient handling of resources and scalable communication between users becomes critical due to network traffic and computation required to track all objects. The solution typically used is to partition the virtual simulation into a number of areas, and to manage each area separately. This is known as Area of Interest Management (AoIM). In this paper, we propose a peer-to-peer communication architecture for collaborative simulations along with a suitable AoIM solution. Our architecture uses both proxies and endsystems to provide a number of communication services suitable for Intranet, Internet, and hybrid-based collaborative virtual simulations.