Improving Responsiveness by Locality in Distribited Virtual Environments

The recent diffusion of wide area networks distributed applications, like distributed virtual environments (DV Es), for instance massively multiplayer games, requires the definition of proper consistency models and protocols. Models like perceptive consistency take into account the interactivity of these applications by defining a set of real time constraints. This paper presents MultiLags, a protocol implementing perceptive consistency which exploits DV E locality to dynamically refine the time constraints according to the network conditions. An implementation of the protocol is presented. A set of experimental results show the effectiveness of the MultiLags approach.