Network-Aware Server Placement for Highly Interactive Distributed Virtual Environments

In distributed virtual environments, e.g., online gaming, collaborative designs and distributed military simulations, interactivity is one of the most important requirements. The users may notice serious degradations in quality of service when interacting in the virtual world if the response from the system is much slower than what they have experienced in real life. In this paper, we consider the problem of placing distributed servers in the network to reduce client-server communication latencies, which is termed the server placement problem. We proposed two new network-aware placement algorithms which take into account users' locations in the network and connectivity at the autonomous system level to determine good sites for servers. Extensive experiments with realistic network models showed that these new algorithms significantly outperform existing approaches that require full knowledge of network connectivity at the router-level topologies.