An adaptive interest management scheme for distributed virtual environments

Traditionally interest management (IM) in distributed environments has been performed through a 'top-down' expression of interest patterns in the model. For many models the interest patterns are complicated or highly dynamic and are not suitable for expression in this way. Top-down expression also forces the model to contain data about the network communication which should strictly be encapsulated by the infrastructure. We propose a system, based on a distributed shared variable abstraction, capable of automatically deriving interest expressions at the infrastructure level in a 'bottom-up' manner. We demonstrate through a simulated testbed that for certain access patterns this dramatically improves the precision of the IM system without sacrificing transparency from a modeller perspective.