Joint Hierarchical Nodes Based User Management (JoHNUM) Infrastructure for the Development of Scalable and Consistent Virtual Worlds

Virtual environments (VEs) have recently gained a lot of attention from the computing, graphics, business and social communities due to a remarkable increase in their popularity. These communities are working together to make these environments more sociable and interesting while introducing novel applications. A number of technical infrastructures are currently hosting these environments, however, client multi server (CMS) infrastructures are considered best for their flexibility. Scalability and consistency are basic issues in developing large scale distributed virtual environments (DVEs) that require special attention. The existing mechanisms have major performance issues, and therefore, more sophisticated infrastructures are required to deal with dynamic requirements of the applications. In this paper, we propose a novel joint hierarchical nodes based user management (JoHNUM) infrastructure for the development of scalable and consistent virtual worlds. It is compared with the game middleware, Matrix, for evaluation purposes that has demonstrated better performance over the existing static mechanisms. Simulation results show that JoHNUM achieves lower levels resource management tree (RMT) and increases user interactive experience. Moreover, it uses fewer resources and minimizes communication overhead, almost the same as Matrix.