Service-Oriented-Architecture based framework for multi-user virtual environments

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an application framework used for creating complex enterprise systems by integrating distributed services. The SOA standards are primarily focused on the service composability and data interoperability. Because of the featured capabilities of SOA, it is also used in distributed simulations. However, SOA has its limitations in terms of the performance of real-time message exchanging. In order to address the disadvantages and improve the application performance, we propose a framework that combines the streaming technology and SOA. The proposed framework is used for constructing multi-user Virtual Environment (VE) applications by integrating the application content from distributed services. The additional streaming channels applied to SOA enable the services to actively propagate the real-time messages. The VE applications constructed using the framework have better performance. However, due to the distributed architecture of SOA and the heavy payload of message exchange in the framework, the application performance needs to be evaluated. We describe the metrics used to evaluate the performance and present the evaluation results. Based on the interaction latency we collected from the experiments, we discuss the categories of applications that can fit well in our framework.