A Spatial Publish Subscribe Overlay for Massively Multiuser Virtual Environments

Peer-To-Peer (P2P) architectures have become popular for designing scalable Virtual Environments (VEs) in recent years. However, one question that remains is whether a single overlay can be flexible enough to support different types of VEs. The authors present S-VON, a P2P overlay that attempts this goal by providing Spatial Publish/Subscribe (SPS) services. Besides flexibility, S-VON also aims to be practical and efficient by utilizing super-peers and considering the physical topology (i.e., network distance) to reduce latencies. Their simulations show that super-peers provide a unique design space where both bandwidth usage and latencies can be effectively reduced, such that even a crowded second life region can be hosted with residential ADSL.