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Reducing the impact of players’ transfer in managing scalable virtual worlds

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Abstract

Virtual worlds are both computation and communication intensive as they provide rich content and frequent updates to players for an improved performance. Virtual worlds use spatial partitioning to scale and dynamic scalability frameworks are the preferred choice for an improved resource utilisation. However, they are very costly in terms of time, as the re-allocation process involves transferring both content and players. Similarly, for an improved interactive experience, users are sent to transit region during a transfer. However, it adds a huge amount of time when an increasing number of users are transferred in sequence. This paper introduces the methods used for players’ movement in OpenSimulator framework with an emphasis on teleport mechanism. It investigates the impact of sequential transfer of increasing number of players on content transfer during the re-allocation process before developing a parallel alternative. The proposed method utilises multi-core processors to transfer players, using the teleport method, in a re-locating region, which is compared with the sequential method adopted earlier for implementing scalability in OpenSimulator. Two different implementations of the parallel algorithm one using, parallel for, and the other utilising, chunk partitioning, are used for comparison with the sequential approach. It is demonstrated that both the parallel implementations improved over the sequential approach in terms of time. Chunk partitioning, however, obtained the best result for the current configurations. Overall, huge reductions in time were observed in the re-allocation process using the improved mechanisms. However, additional and dedicated resources are expected to further improve the timings required for players’ transfer and re-allocation process.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Science and Technology Bannu, Bannu, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan

    Umar Farooq, Muneeba Shereen & Ihsan Rabbi

  2. Faculty of Computing and Information Technology, Sohar University, Sohar, Oman

    Kashif Zia

Authors
  1. Umar Farooq
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  2. Muneeba Shereen
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  3. Kashif Zia
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  4. Ihsan Rabbi
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Correspondence to Ihsan Rabbi.

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Farooq, U., Shereen, M., Zia, K. et al. Reducing the impact of players’ transfer in managing scalable virtual worlds. Multimed Tools Appl 81, 29423–29442 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-022-12505-y

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