Priority scheduling for networked virtual environments

When simulating large virtual environments (VEs), contention for limited resources such as the CPU, rendering pipeline, or network bandwidth frequently degrades the system´s performance. Whenever such a competition occurs and not all elements that require the resource can be serviced, an approximation must be made to avoid compromising interactive performance. We propose an enhancement to the round-robin approach called Priority Round Robin scheduling (PRR). This algorithm enforces priorities, while retaining the output sensitivity and starvation-free performance of round-robin scheduling. Priorities are set by a user-defined error metric (such as visual error), which the algorithm attempts to minimize. This permits not only scheduling the entities competing for a resource such as updates competing for the network, but also filling the gap between filtering and scheduling techniques. We evaluate our algorithm in a client-server system