| Online gaming: peer-to-peer scalable alternatives |
"PlanetLab is the best platform for testing and understanding the behaviour of distributed systems in the wild." Participating organizations: Eurecom, Sophia Antipolis (France); Thomson, Paris (France). A Networked Virtual Environment (NVE) is a synthetic world where multiple participants interact via the Internet. Commercial NVEs such as Second Life are implemented using a Client/Server (C/S) architecture which has serious scalability limitations. A scalable alternative to C/S is to use a peer-to-peer approach, where the NVE is maintained in a distributed way. In this work, researchers at Eurecom and Thomson have designed and deployed a peer-to-peer architecture for NVEs that was evaluated on the PlanetLab Europe testbed.  For their first extensive analysis of Second Life (SL) reseachers deployed a crawler application. This is a modified SL client that connects to SL servers, and exploits standard avatar capabilities to collect information about the virtual world. The SL crawler was launched from several test platforms including PlanetLab Europe. Specifically, they used five PlanetLab machines in order to "crawl" five of the most popular SL regions every 30 seconds. They collected traces about avatar behaviours during three days between May 01 and May 04, 2008. The results were presented in a paper at Conext'08.In the second phase of the project, presented at Netgames'09, researchers developed a SL client that allows its users to take advantage of a peer-to-peer network. They used the PlanetLab Europe testbed in order to emulate realistic network conditions in multiple experiments performed between June and August 2008. Each experiment lasted one hour and involved about 300 PlanetLab machines. Related papers: M. Varvello, F. Picconi, C. Diot, E. Biersack. Is There Life in Second Life? Proceedings of Conext'08. Madrid (Spain): December 2008.  M. Varvello, S. Ferrari, E. Biersack, C. Diot. A Distributed Avatar Management for Second Life. Proceedings of Netgames'09. Paris (France): November 2009.
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