Overlay routing architectures for massively multiuser virtual environments

Massively Multiuser Virtual Environments (MMVE) are network applications that simulate the experience of realtime interaction among multiple users distributed all over the internet. In order to share the common sense of time and place, multiple entities interacting in the shared virtual environment must be aware of the modifications or interactions within the shared environment. This is achieved through the distribution of update messages. As the number of users and entities increases, there is a considerable increase in the amount of update messages exchanged among the users and entities. Supporting the large of update messages, especially in massive environments, is one of the most important challenges in the design of MMVEs. The use of a distributed architecture allowing users to handle the traffic among each other in a peer to peer (P2P) fashion is one solution to this problem. However, such solution must in turn deal with a variety of challenges related to the noncentralized nature of the protocol.