A Framework for Performance Evaluation of Large-scale Interactive Distributed Virtual Environments

Interactivity is a key consideration in large-scale distributed virtual environments (DVEs), such as massively multi-player online games. Due to the Internet dynamics as well as the large-scale and distributed nature of many DVEs, it is difficult to quantify the possible improvements claimed by various DVE interactivity enhancement approaches. In this paper, we propose a scalable framework that supports evaluation of interactivity indicators, under dynamic Internet conditions. We have developed and used this framework to conduct extensive experiments on PlanetLab with many distributed client and server locations. We have collected the latency experienced by over 700 client locations distributed around the globe over a few days; and used it for evaluating performance of some recently proposed zone mapping algorithms.