Nomad: Virtual Environments on P2P Voronoi Overlays

Nomad is a support for the development of distributed virtual environments(DVE) on P2P networks. In a DVE each avatar generally interacts with other ones in its area of interest, i.e. the DVE region surrounding its location. Nomad exploits a Voronoi partition of the DVE to define a highly dynamic P2P overlay that connects a peer with those controlling avatars in its area of interest. This paper introduces an accurate definition of neighbours and describes the basic protocol defined by Nomad. This protocol is then refined through a set of optimizations. Finally, preliminary experimental results are presented.