Distributed avatar management for Second Life

Second Life (SL) is currently the most popular social virtual world, i.e., a digitalization of the real world where avatars can meet, socialize and trade. SL is managed through a Client/Server (C/S) architecture with a very high cost and limited scalability. A scalable and cheap alternative to C/S is to use a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) approach, where SL users rely only on their own resources (storage, CPU and bandwidth) to run the virtual world. We develop a SL client that allows its users to take advantage of a P2P network structured as a Delaunay overlay. We compare the performance of a P2P and C/S architecture for Second Life, executing several instances of our client over Planetlab and populating a SL region with our controlled avatars. Avatar mobility traces collected in SL are used to drive avatar behaviors. The results show that P2P improves user experience by about 20% compared to C/S (measured in term of consistency). Avatar interactivity is also 5 times faster in P2P than in C/S.

[1]  Jörg Liebeherr,et al.  Application-layer multicasting with Delaunay triangulation overlays , 2002, IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun..

[2]  Matteo Varvello,et al.  P2P Second Life: Experimental Validation Using Kad , 2009, IEEE INFOCOM 2009.

[3]  Adrian Bowyer,et al.  Computing Dirichlet Tessellations , 1981, Comput. J..

[4]  Pradeep Dubey,et al.  Second Life and the New Generation of Virtual Worlds , 2008, Computer.

[5]  Jacob R. Lorch,et al.  Scaling Peer-to-Peer Games in Low-Bandwidth Environments , 2007, IPTPS.

[6]  Jorge Urrutia,et al.  Compass routing on geometric networks , 1999, CCCG.

[7]  Sugih Jamin,et al.  Inet-3.0: Internet Topology Generator , 2002 .

[8]  Antony I. T. Rowstron,et al.  Pastry: Scalable, Decentralized Object Location, and Routing for Large-Scale Peer-to-Peer Systems , 2001, Middleware.

[9]  Shinichi Ueshima,et al.  Incremental construction of Delaunay overlaid network for virtual collaborative space , 2005, Third International Conference on Creating, Connecting and Collaborating through Computing (C5'05).

[10]  Shun-Yun Hu,et al.  VON: a scalable peer-to-peer network for virtual environments , 2006, IEEE Network.

[11]  Wei Tsang Ooi,et al.  Avatar mobility in user-created networked virtual worlds: measurements, analysis, and implications , 2009, Multimedia Tools and Applications.

[12]  Mark Claypool,et al.  Traffic analysis of avatars in Second Life , 2008, NOSSDAV.

[13]  G. A. Miller.  THE PSYCHOLOGICAL REVIEW THE MAGICAL NUMBER SEVEN, PLUS OR MINUS TWO: SOME LIMITS ON OUR CAPACITY FOR PROCESSING INFORMATION 1 , 1956 .

[14]  Gwendal Simon,et al.  Solipsis: A Massively Multi-Participant Virtual World , 2003, PDPTA.

[15]  Christophe Diot,et al.  Dynamic clustering in delaunay-based P2P networked virtual environments , 2007, NetGames '07.

[16]  Christophe Diot,et al.  Is there life in Second Life? , 2008, CoNEXT '08.

[17]  Kajal T. Claypool,et al.  Latency and player actions in online games , 2006, CACM.

[18]  Djamel Sadok,et al.  Traffic Analysis Beyond This World: the Case of Second Life , 2007 .

[19]  Srinivasan Seshan,et al.  Donnybrook: enabling large-scale, high-speed, peer-to-peer games , 2008, SIGCOMM '08.

[20]  Srinivasan Seshan,et al.  Colyseus: A Distributed Architecture for Online Multiplayer Games , 2006, NSDI.

[21]  Helge Backhaus,et al.  Voronoi-based adaptive scalable transfer revisited: gain and loss of a Voronoi-based peer-to-peer approach for MMOG , 2007, NetGames '07.