Priority round-robin scheduling for very large virtual environments

In virtual environments containing a very large number of objects, the limited amount of available resources often proves to be a bottleneck, causing a competition for those resources, for example network bandwidth, processing power or the rendering pipeline. This leads to a degradation of the system's performance, as only a small number of elements can be granted the resource required. We present a generic scheduling algorithm that allows us to achieve a graceful degradation: it is output sensitive, minimizes the risk of starvation and enforces priorities based on a freely definable error metric. Hence it can be employed in virtual environments of almost any size, to schedule elements which are competing for a determined resource because of a bottleneck.