Three-tiered interest management for large-scale virtual environments

In the past there have been several approaches taken. In NPSNET [1], the world is broken into hexagons, each representing a multicast group. Each entity sends state information to a multicast group corresponding to the local hexagon it is in, while at the same time subscribing to many surrounding hexagons via their multicast groups. This approach, while not exact, works well when entities are distributed evenly within the virtual environment, but fails if all entities are clumped within the same cell.

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