Fairness-aware Update Schedules for Improving Consistency in Multi-server Distributed Virtual Environments

Yusen Li, Yunhua Deng, Wentong Cai, Xueyan Tang

Abstract: In Distributed Virtual Environments (DVEs), how to guarantee consistency and fairness is a primary concern for improving user experience. As the scale of DVE systems grows fast, multi-server architecture has been widely used in large scale DVEs such as Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs). In multi-server DVEs (MSDVEs), servers may get saturated with resources such as network bandwidth due to huge resource demand and workload variability. With resource limitations, state updates cannot be disseminated timely and inconsistency and unfairness will be greatly increased if the resources are not allocated properly. In this paper, we propose a fairness-aware state update scheduling algorithm which can minimize total inconsistency while guarantee fairness in MSDVEs under servers' network bandwidth constraints. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm significantly improves the consistency and fairness compared to other existing update algorithms.