AN alternative design of Collaborative Virtual Environment architecture based on cloud computing

Abstract

Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) systems allow the sharing of virtual space, and each participant is represented by an entity in the CVE. Resources are consumed when interaction among several users occurs. The resources are consumed as a result of updating its own state, and the communication resources required to distribute the update of counterpart users in the CVE. The Peer-to-Peer (p2p) and Client Server (CS) architecture in CVE has the limitation of scaling to large number of users while maintaining consistency in the virtual world. This paper identifies the basic requirements of CVE systems, proposed a model based on cloud computing to improve the performance of the traditional CVE systems to evade the limitations of the p2p and CS. The design of the cloud computing-based CVE architecture proposes in our research consist of three layers namely, infrastructure, platform, and application. The potential benefits of the CVE architecture presented in this paper indicated a performance improvement over the traditional CVE. The proposed architecture with little modification can easily be implemented in real life applications to improve the performance of collaborative virtual applications