A Distributed Topology Control Algorithm for P2P Based Simulations

Abstract

Although collaborative distributed simulations and virtual environments (VE) have been an active area of research in the past few years, they have recently gained even more attention due to the emergence of online gaming, emergency simulation and planning systems, and disaster management applications. Such environments combine graphics, haptics, animations and networking to create interactive multimodal worlds that allows participants to collaborate in realtime. Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming (MMOG), perhaps the most widely deployed practical application of distributed virtual environments, allows players to act together concurrently in a virtual world over the Internet. IP Multicasting would be an optimal solution for the dissemination of updates among participants, but IP multicasting is not available to home users on the Internet, due to a number of technological, practical, and business reasons. In light of the lack availability of IP Multicasting on the global Internet, researchers have recently tended to shift multicasting from the networking layer to the application layer, known as Application Layer Multicasting, effectively constructing an overlay network among participants of the distributed simulation where end hosts themselves participate in the dissemination of update messages. In this paper, we propose a topology control architecture to support P2P based collaborative distributed simulations over the Internet by using AIM. We present our networking model and its rationale, theoretical proof, and simulation measurements in comparison with other methods as proof of concept.