On View Consistency in Multi-Server Distributed Virtual Environments

A distributed virtual environment (DVE) is a shared virtual environment (VE) that allows remote users to interact with each other through networks. DVEs are becoming very popular due to some prominent applications, such as online games and virtual worlds. To support a large number of users, a multi-server DVE architecture may be adopted, with each server managing a subset of users. However, there are two critical problems with this architecture: view inconsistency caused by delays and server overloading caused by uneven distribution of users. While the first problem affects users' perception of the VE and causes user disputes, the second problem affects the system response time. In this paper, we first show that the view inconsistency problem and the load balancing problem are conflicting objectives. We then propose an efficient joint optimization framework to address both problems. Our results show that the proposed method can improve the view inconsistency problem significantly, which is important to the interactivity of DVE applications.