Preserving locality in MMVE applications based on ant clustering

Massively multiuser virtual environment (MMVE) applications have the challenge of update message exchange among a large number of users. Real-time collaboration in the virtual environments requires the updates to be exchanged with the minimum end-to-end latency and overhead. This article proposes a new clustering technique to improve the update message exchange efficiency in MMVE applications. The proposed solution is based on the use of ant clustering technique in order to cluster the users based on their geographical proximity. These clusters can be used as localized routing regions in the hierarchical routing architecture and prevent local messages to be routed through long distance hops. Therefore, clustering can help to reduce both update exchange latency and underlay network traffic.