A Peer-to-Peer Multicast Architecture for Supporting Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) in Medicine

Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) can improve the way remote users interact with one another while learning or training skills on a given task. One CVE´s application is the possibility of simulating medical procedures in which a group of remote users can train and interact simultaneously. It is important that networking issues and performance evaluation of CVEs allows us to understand how such systems can work in the Internet, as well as the requirements for multisensorial and real-time data. Thus, this paper discloses implementation issues of a peer-to-peer multicast network architecture on the collaborative module of the CyberMed VR framework. The multicast protocol is known to provide better scalability and decrease the use of bandwidth on CVEs, allowing better Quality of Experience (QoE). Finally it presents the results of a performance evaluation experiment.