A scalable synchronization technique for distributed virtual environments based on networked-server architectures

Large scale distributed virtual environments have become a major trend in distributed applications, mainly due to the enormous popularity of multi-player online games in the entertainment industry. Thus, scalability has become an essential issue for these highly interactive systems. In this paper, we propose a new synchronization technique for those distributed virtual environments that are based on networked-server architectures. Unlike other methods described in the literature, the proposed technique takes into account the updating messages exchanged by avatars, thus releasing the servers from updating the location of such avatars when synchronizing the state of the system. As a result, the communications required for synchronization are greatly reduced, and this method results more scalable. Also, these communications are distributed along the whole synchronization period, in order to reduce workload peaks. Performance evaluation results show that the proposed approach significantly reduces the percentage of CPU utilization in the servers when compared with other existing methods, therefore supporting a higher number of avatars. Additionally, the system response time is reduced accordingly.