Local Data Management with Multi-aura Visibility Filtering for 3D Content Streaming

Real-time geometric model distribution in large-scale distributed virtual environments (DVEs) is achieved by a technique known as content streaming. Content streaming mechanisms identify the fraction of static content to be delivered to each user, as DVE users would not be interested in the complete content of a virtual world at any point of time in the simulation. This technique also eliminates the hassles of pre-installations and offline patch updates. Most existing content streaming approaches reduce the overall network resource usage by compromising on the details of the 3D models streamed. In this paper, we present a caching framework termed as Local Data Management (LDM), which is used in conjunction with a multiresolution content filtering mechanism. The proposed framework reduces bandwidth usage by maintaining local copies of geometry data on the client system. We have evaluated the performance of the LDM framework in order to understand the trade-offs between resource utilization on the server and local disk space usage on the client, under various system conditions and scenarios.