Collaborative Interest Management for Peer-to-Peer Networked Virtual Environment

Interest Management (IM) aims at eliminating irrelevant state updates transmitted in Networked Virtual Environment (NVE). The traditional IM mechanisms can be classified into area-based and cell-based mechanisms. Hybrid IM mechanism was proposed recently to reduce the communication overhead by utilizing the cell-based mechanism to reduce Area-Of-Interest (AOI) updates in the area-based mechanism. Compared to the traditional mechanisms, the hybrid mechanism reduces the upload bandwidth consumption at each player site and thus allows more players to join the virtual environment with today's network capacity. However, it requires each player maintains some global information about all other players. Updating the global information undoubtedly involves communication overhead. This paper proposes a collaborative IM mechanism for peer-to-peer NVEs, which works only relying on each joining player's local knowledge rather than globally available information so as to further reduce the communication cost of IM mechanisms. The performance of our collaborative IM mechanism is evaluated by simulating multiplayer game scenarios and the results are compared with the hybrid IM mechanism as well as the well-established peer-to-peer NVE neighbor discovery mechanism VON.