VON: a scalable peer-to-peer network for virtual environments

Abstract

The scalability of large-scale networked virtual environments (NVEs) such as today's massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) faces inherent limits imposed by client-server architectures. We identify an emerging research direction that applies peer-to-peer (P2P) networks in order to realize more scalable and affordable NVEs. The central issue for P2P-based NVE (P2P-NVE) systems is to correctly and efficiently maintain the topology of all participating peers by solving the neighbor discovery problem. We also propose the Voronoi-based overlay network (VON), a simple and efficient design that maintains the P2P topology in a fully-distributed, low-latency, and message-efficient manner. Simulation results show that by bounding the per-node resource consumption, VON can be fundamentally more scalable than existing methods while achieving high topology consistency and reliability.