Topology Control Modeling and Measurement for Networked Virtual Environments

In this paper we will propose a novel distributed architecture for overlay tree construction in collaborative virtual environments that is unlimitedly scalable due to its fully decentralized nature. The routing issue over this architecture will later be discussed and several forwarding schemes based on distributed hash tables (DHT) will be proposed. One of the main concerns for a routing algorithm is to keep a trade-off between the algorithm locality and the algorithm performance. In a global algorithm where nodes make the forwarding decision based on the information gathered from all other nodes in the network, the routing performance may obviously be better. However such a large group of neighbors result in a large topology discovery cost and huge routing tables when the number of nodes exceeds a certain limit. In this article we will try to find the best trade-off among these factors therefore proposing an optimum neighborhood radius for each node. Finally a comparison will be made regarding path delay criteria among several proposed forwarding schemes at the optimum neighborhood radius point.