JaDE: A JXTA support for distributed virtual environments

This paper introduces JaDE, a P2P support for the development of distributed virtual environments that improves DVE scalability through the notion of area of interest. JaDE defines a set of protocols to support both the active entities and passive objects of the DVE. The state of passive objects is replicated on a set of peers to increase the reliability and the responsiveness of the application. Since passive objects may be concurrently updated by the active entities of the DVE, a novel consistency protocol is defined together with a set of mechanisms to guarantee the persistence of passive objects in a DVE environment. The paper presents an implementation of JaDE which exploits the JXTA distributed platform and shows how the JaDE functionalities may be supported by JXTA protocols. A set of preliminary experimental results are discussed.