A consistency maintenance algorithm based on time bounding volume in CVE systems

Peer to peer architecture is widely adopted to design a scalable collaborative virtual environment because of the advantage of high fault-tolerance capability and low communication latency. However, due to the lack of the central control unit, each user has to send the update to others in order to keep consistency which will cause traffic to surge and exhaust the network bandwidth with the increase of the users. Dead Reckoning (DR) algorithm can reduce the consumption of network resource by filtering some of the messages, but it may lead to the inconsistency of system. In order to solve the conflict between maintaining the state consistency and supporting more users sharing the virtual environment, a consistency maintenance algorithm based on the time bounding volume is proposed. Time bounding volume is defined to predict user’s movement space during a simulation interval. When two users’ time bounding volumes overlap, it may produce the interaction between the users in the time interval. At this time, the key updates of two users are sent to each other in time to keep the state consistency. Object collision error testing and network traffic testing results show that the consistency maintenance algorithm based on time bounding volume can maintain the state consistency and reduce the consumption of network resources simultaneously.