A multi-layered emulation platform to verify the effectiveness of consistency control approaches about message ordering

It is an important issue to preserve the consistent delivering order of messages at each site in Distributed Virtual Environments(DVEs). Currently, the violations of message delivery order are inclined to happen in the large-scale and frequently interactive DVEs running on Wide Area Network(WAN). The inconsistent anomalies are characterized as unpredictable, unrepeatable and uncontrollable, which results in the severe problem for the development of the consistency control approaches. Meanwhile, it is also highly expensive to directly verify the proposed approaches on WAN. Therefore, in this paper, we design and establish an original multi-layered emulation platform in LAN, which can emulate the network latency of WAN and repeat the scenarios of violations. On the platform, the designers of consistency approaches don´t have to spend efforts to realize the fundamental functions of the verification, but could pay more attention to the development and optimization of the control algorithms, which is very beneficial for the improvement of message ordering approaches.