Consistency-Aware Zone Mapping and Client Assignment in Multi-Server Distributed Virtual Environments

In Distributed Virtual Environments (DVEs), the primary task is to maintain a consistent view of the virtual world among all users. Multi-server architecture has been shown to have good scalability to support a large population of users in DVEs. In the zone-based Multi-server Distributed Virtual Environment (MSDVE), zone mapping and client assignment are two key issues in the design of an efficient and scalable MSDVE. Most of the existing work on the zone mapping and client assignment issues in MSDVE aims to either balance workload among servers, reduce inter-server communication, and/or reduce transmission delay. In this paper, we study the zone mapping and client assignment issues from a new perspective aiming to reduce the inconsistency of a DVE. Using the time-space inconsistency metric, we formally formulate the problem as a mix integer programming problem. The zone mapping and client assignment strategy is proposed which consists of a centralized algorithm for initialization and a distributed adaptive tuning algorithm for running system. Extensive experiments were conducted both by simulation and real system for evaluating the performance of the proposed solutions and results are reported in the paper.