Paper Info
Title
Distributed avatar management for Second Life
Abstract
Second Life (SL) is currently the most popular social virtual world, i.e., a digitalization of the real world where avatars can meet, socialize and trade. SL is managed through a Client/Server (C/S) architecture with a very high cost and limited scalability. A scalable and cheap alternative to C/S is to use a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) approach, where SL users rely only on their own resources (storage, CPU and bandwidth) to run the virtual world. We develop a SL client that allows its users to take advantage of a P2P network structured as a Delaunay overlay. We compare the performance of a P2P and C/S architecture for Second Life, executing several instances of our client over Planetlab and populating a SL region with our controlled avatars. Avatar mobility traces collected in SL are used to drive avatar behaviors. The results show that P2P improves user experience by about 20% compared to C/S (measured in term of consistency). Avatar interactivity is also 5 times faster in P2P than in C/S.
Year
DOI
Venue
2009
10.1109/NETGAMES.2009.5446230
Network and Systems Support for Games
Keywords
Field
DocType
avatar interactivity,avatar mobility,p2p network,controlled avatar,sl user,second life,sl client,avatar management,avatar behavior,popular social virtual world,sl region,servers,p2p,measurement,user experience,data structures,virtual worlds,client server architecture,client server
Interactivity,PlanetLab,User experience design,Computer science,Server,Avatar,Distributed computing,Client–server model,Data structure,Simulation,Multimedia,Operating system,Scalability
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
2156-8146
978-1-4244-5604-8
6
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.51
15
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Matteo Varvello179748.31
Stefano Ferrari260.51
Ernst Biersack32176220.80
Christophe Diot47831590.69