Elastic Consistency in Decentralized Distributed Virtual Environments

Distributed virtual environments like online games or 3D virtual worlds have become very popular in the last few years and a more substantial surge in popularity and use is expected. Because of the huge number of users, such environments will undergo a change of infrastructure from a centralized to a decentralized one, making higher demands on consistency issues. This paper addresses consistency problems which may occur in distributed virtual environments and introduces the elastic consistency model to tackle these problems. According to elastic consistency, different consistency levels setting up a trade-off between consistency and responsiveness of the environment should be introduced in order to provide an efficient way of interaction on a global scale.