nSense: Decentralized interest management in higher dimensions through mutual notification

Interest management is a key component of decentralized multiplayer gaming overlays. Current approaches are limited to two, sometimes three spatial dimensions. Considering games that use game features like portals and unit-type visibility, this limitation either forces the game designer to omit such features or it causes increased latency and bandwidth for the player. In this work we present and evaluate nSense, a decentralized interest management scheme that can be used for an arbitrary number of dimensions. It uses mutual notification so it only needs to connect to players with close proximity. Therefore it is highly scalable and suitable for massive multiplayer online games.