Message caching for local and global resource optimization in shared virtual environments

Helmuth Trefftz, Ivan Marsic

Abstract: The use of Shared Virtual Environments is growing in areas such as multi-player video games, military and industrial training, and collaborative design and engineering. As a result, different mixes of computing power and graphics capabilities of the participating computers arise naturally as the variety of people/organizations sharing a virtual environment grows. This paper presents an adaptive mechanism to reduce bandwidth usage and to optimize the use of computing resources of heterogeneous computers mixes utilized in a shared virtual environment. The mechanism is based on caching of both outgoing- and incoming-messages. We also report the results of implementing the proposed scheme in a simple shared virtual environment.