Chapter 12 – Scalability

Publisher Summary Scalability refers to techniques that ensure that some quality of service is maintained as the number of users goes up or the complexity of the world increases. While specific latency requirements motivate a specific choice of consistency mechanism, these techniques mostly assume that there is a certain amount of bandwidth available. The primary way that scalability is supported is in exploiting clients' levels of interest in other entities in the environment. The interest of clients and their relationship to awareness have been discussed in this chapter. The process of partitioning the load of an environment either by deploying multiple servers or using advanced peer-to-peer methods is shown. In both cases, message routing, which is “dumb,” and message filtering which uses application-level semantics of messages have been distinguished. The subsequent impact on latency and synchronization due to routing and filtering of packets now taking multiple stages has also been discussed. The relationships between peer-to-peer group communication and the requirements of peer-to-peer networked virtual environments (NVEs) and network games (NGs) have been noted in the chapter. Peer-to-peer techniques that are targeted at NVEs and NGs specifically are elaborated and thus a routing system is used, where packets are distributed using links between clients that are close in the virtual environment, not clients that are close in Internet terms.

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