Predictive Interest Management: An Approach to Managing Message Dissemination for Distributed Virtual Environments

Interest management aims to overcome limited network resources to provide a distributed virtual environment (DVE) that is scalable in terms of number of users and virtual world complexity (number of objects). Interest management limits interactions between objects in a virtual world by only allowing objects to communicate their actions to other objects that fall within their influence. An important aspect of any interest management scheme is the ability to identify when objects should be interacting and enable such interaction via message passing. Existing approaches to interest management are not suited to objects that may travel at greatly varying speeds and may only interact briefly. In such a scenario, the time taken by existing interest management schemes to resolve which objects influence each other may be too large to enable the desired interaction to occur. In this paper we present an approach to interest management based on the predicted movement of objects. Our approach determines the frequency of message exchange between objects on the likelihood that such objects will influence each other in the near future. Via this mechanism we aim to ensure a scalable DVE that may satisfy message exchange requirements of briefly interacting objects irrelevant of the speed such objects may traverse a virtual world.