A peer-to-peer message exchange scheme for large-scale networked virtual environments

This paper presents a scalable peer-to-peer communication architecture suitable for supporting networked virtual environments that does not require costly dedicated servers or special infrastructure such as multicasting. Entities establish an overlay network based on the distance between the entities. As message exchange is handled directly by unicast between nearest-neighbor entities, the communication overhead is kept low. The proposed architecture is highly scalable and suitable for online applications such as massively multiplayer online role-playing games with hundreds of thousands of participants, where the dominant factor affecting scalability and performance is the overhead associated with exchange of update messages between users.