nSense: Interest Management in higher dimensions

In Networked Virtual Environments (NVE), Interest Management (IM) is a key part of the system that determines which of a participant´s actions have to be communicated to which subset of the other participants. Since traditional client/server approaches have several drawbacks, a variety of alternative peer-to-peer (P2P) approaches have been presented by the community [1]. In many of these approaches, interest management is also responsible for maintaining connectivity of the P2P network. Aiming for latency-sensitive applications, systems like VON [2] and pSense [3] use mutual notification mechanisms, building the topology based on the participants´ virtual world proximities. A common limitation of these, however, is their fixed dimensionality: most are only designed for two spatial dimensions, a few are capable of handling three. In this work, we discuss options for dealing with an arbitrary number of dimensions. We propose a dynamic localized peer-to-peer IM that supports and exploits any number of dimensions. In our IM, peers communicate directly within their vision range. The space outside of the vision range is divided in sectors, each guarded by a sensor node that notifies them of approaching peers. We determine criteria for an efficient sector partitioning, discuss several approaches and present a suitable algorithm.