Integrating centralized and P2P architectures to support interest management in distributed virtual environments

A fundamental problem for the development of P2P Distributed Virtual Environments is the definition of an overlay supporting interest management, i.e. determining all the entities of the virtual world that are relevant for a given peer. To this end, we propose a gossip-based approach that considers the coverage of the Area Of Interest of a peer as the guiding principle for the definition of the overlay and its maintenance. The resulting overlay provides a support for a best- effort resolution of interest management, so that it can be mostly supported through communications on the P2P overlay, with minimal intervention of a centralized entity. The paper presents a set of extensive simulations based on realistic mobility traces. The experimental results show the effectiveness of gossip for the construction of a best-effort Interest Management overlay.