P. Morillo, J.M. Orduña, M. Fernández and J. Duato (Spain)
Distributed Virtual Environments, load balancing , cascad ing effect
Distributed Virtual Environment (DVE) systems have ex perienced a spectacular growth last years. The partitioning problem has been proven as the most critical issue in order to design scalable and efficient DVE systems. It consists of efficiently assigning clients (3-D avatars) to the servers in the system, and some methods have been proposed for solving it. However, only two of these methods take into account the non-linear behavior of DVE servers with the number of avatars attached to them. In this paper, we propose a fine-grain load balancing technique for solving the partitioning problem in DVE systems. Unlike a previ ously proposed technique, this proposal takes into account the estimated state of the target server before re-assigning avatars. The exceeding workload that causes the saturation of a given server is proportionally distributed among sev eral servers, if necessary. This method avoids the cascading effect, and it allows to increase system throughput with few re-assignments of avatars. Evaluation results show that the proposed method can improve DVE system performance, regardless of both the movement pattern and also the initial distribution of avatars in the virtual world.
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