Interest management for distributed virtual environments

The past two decades have witnessed an explosion in the deployment of large-scale distributed simulations and distributed virtual environments in different domains, including military and academic simulation systems, social media, and commercial applications such as massively multiplayer online games. As these systems become larger, more data intensive, and more latency sensitive, the optimisation of the flow of data, a paradigm referred to as interest management, has become increasingly critical to address the scalability requirements and enable their successful deployment. Numerous interest management schemes have been proposed for different application scenarios. This article provides a comprehensive survey of the state of the art in the design of interest management algorithms and systems. The scope of the survey includes current and historical projects providing a taxonomy of the existing schemes and summarising their key features. Identifying the primary requirements of interest management, the article discusses the trade-offs involved in the design of existing approaches.