SimP2P: A Peer-to-Peer System for Texture Distribution in Social Virtual Worlds

Social virtual worlds (MMOW) allow users to dynamically create new content with high degree of personalization and immersion in shared real time environments. Popular MMOWs, such as Second Life (SL), are based on a Client/Server (C/S) approach for guaranteeing a shared consistent view of the virtual world, thus generating high network traffic volumes. This is due to the intrinsic features of MMOWs, where servers keep most information of the virtual environment, unlike some other types of virtual worlds, such as Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG), such as World of Warcraft, where clients keep all objects and textures stored locally. Although the C/S approach is universally used because it is reliable and easily controlled, it poses a high burden on server hardware and bandwidth. In this paper, we propose SimP2P, a peer- to-peer approach for sharing textures among clients for MMOW environments, such as OpenSim. Our results show that SimP2P is able to decrease significantly the traffic sent by the OpenSim server, as well as to provide a much better Quality of Experience (QoE) for users, measured by texture response time.