Power-aware State Dissemination in Mobile Distributed Virtual Environments

In distributed simulations, such as multi-player distributed virtual environments (DVE), power consumption traditionally has not been a major design factor. However, emerging battery-operated mobile computing platforms require revisiting DVE implementation approaches for maximizing power efficiency. In this paper we explore some implications of power considerations in DVE implementation over mobile handhelds connected by wireless networks. We focus on the state dissemination problem in DVEs and propose a new power-aware dead reckoning framework for power-efficient state dissemination. We highlight a fundamental tradeoff between state consistency and power consumption, and present an adaptive dead reckoning algorithm that attempts to dynamically optimize the tradeoff at runtime. We present a quantitative evaluation of our approach using a synthetic DVE benchmark application. 1