Resilience and Multicast Aspects of the Structured Network Overlay GP3

Today Massive Multiuser Virtual Environments (MMVEs) are for the most part realized in a centralized fashion. While this provides advantages in terms of manageability and controllability to the providers, it is not feasible for a global-scale scenario like a 3D Web. In order to provide such a global-scale virtual environment it is indispensable to utilize P2P technologies. Within the HyperVerse project, we have developed and recently presented a two-tier Peer-to-Peer (P2P) architecture that incorporates a loosely structured P2P overlay of user peers and a highly structured overlay of server machines, constituting a reliable backbone service. For the interconnection of this backbone servers we proposed a structured P2P overlay named GP3. It has been shown, that this overlay allows efficient join and node lookup operations and allows for the reference locality in virtual environments. This paper studies the GP3 algorithm with respect to multicast aspects as well as resilience against node failures.