Reducing view inconsistency by predicting avatars motion in multi-server distributed virtual environments.pdfVIP

Journal of Network and Computer Applications 40 (2014) 21–30 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Network and Computer Applications journal homepage: /locate/jnca Reducing view inconsistency by predicting avatars motion in multi-server distributed virtual environments Haiyang Hu a,n, Yizhi Ren b,nn, Xu Xu a, Liguo Huang c, Hua Hu a a School of Computer Science and Technology, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Hangzhou 310018, China b School of Software Engineering, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Hangzhou 310018, China c Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX 75275-0122, USA article info Article history: Received 7 January 2013 Received in revised form 16 June 2013 Accepted 5 August 2013 Available online 8 September 2013 Keywords: Distributed virtual environments View consistency Probability models Virtual avatars Density-based clustering abstract Multi-server distributed virtual environment (DVE) system contains a set of servers to support a huge number of geographically distributed users. It provides a shared virtual scenario where users represented by avatars participate in and interact with each other through networks. However, there are two technical challenges in designing an ef?cient DVE system with this architecture: view inconsistency caused by network delays and server overloading caused by uneven distribution of users. While the ?rst problem affects users perception of the VE and causes user disputes, the second problem affects the system response time. We present a new partitioning framework to simultaneously address the two problems, in which the DVE scenario is divided into a set of disjoint grids called virtual cells. The virtual cells are then indexed by a region quadtree and an algorithm is proposed to search the region quadtree so as to equally partition avatars among servers. By using probabilistic models to predict each avatars future motion and the virtual region its area of interest (AOI)