Reducing Network Load in Large-Scale, Peer-to-peer Virtual Environments with 3D Voronoi Diagrams

When moving towards fully Peer-to-Peer Virtual Environments (P2P-VE), the amount of network traffic generated at each peer remains a significant concern. Multiplayer Online Games (MOG) are the largest application subset of VEs and have been shown to require high frequency of update messages and minimal network latencies. Yet, this demanding criteria must be balanced with the need to also limit the otherwise quadratic growth of network traffic amongst peers. Two-dimensional Voronoi Diagrams (2D-VD) have been proposed as a way to address the inherent traffic scalability issues by naturally clustering players (and thus their update traffic) within the game-world. However, other important issues related to game-play and overall VE performance remained and were only addressed by our recent introduction of a third dimension to the VD computations (3D-VD). As our experimentation indicates, this unique approach has significant impact on the network characteristics of a P2P-VE. Due to its 3D nature, more connections are necessary per peer but a mechanism is successfully introduced to cope with the increased bandwidth requirement. More importantly, the results obtained show considerable reduction in traffic load under varying peer topologies while still maintaining the desirable features of 3D-VD.