PhD ThesisNetworked Virtual Environments (NVEs) have always imposed strict requirements on
architectures for update dissemination (UD). Clients must maintain views that are as
synchronous and consistent as possible in order to achieve a level of user experience that
is tolerable for the user.
In recent times, the web browser has become a viable platform on which to deploy
these NVEs. Doing so adds another layer of challenges however. There is a distinct need
for systems that adapt to these constraints and exploit the characteristics of this new
context to achieve reliably high consistency between users for a range of use cases.
A promising approach is to carry forward the rich body of past research in peer-to-peer
(P2P) networks and apply this to the problem of UD in NVEs under the constraints of a
web browser. Making NVEs scalable through P2P networks is not a new concept, however
previous work has always been either too specific to a certain kind of NVE, or made
performance trade-offs that especially cannot work in a browser context. Furthermore,
in previous work on P2P NVEs, UD has always taken the backseat compared to object
management and distributed neighbour selection. The evaluation of these UD systems
have as a result been one-dimensional and overly simplifying.
In this work, we begin by surveying past UD solutions and evaluation methodologies.
We then capture NVE, browser, and network constraints, aided by the analysis of a rich
dataset of NVE network traces that we have collected, and draw out key observations
and challenges to develop the requirements for a feasible UD system. From there, we
illustrate the design and implementation of our P2P UD system for NVEs in great detail,
augmenting our system with novel architectural insights from the Software-Defined
Networking (SDN) space. Finally, we evaluate our system under a range of workloads,
test environments, and performance metrics to demonstrate that we have overcome these
challenges, as well as compare our method to other existing methods, which we have also
implemented and tested.
We hope that our contributions in research and resources (such as our taxonomies,
NVE analysis, UD system, browser library, workload datasets, and a benchmarking framework)
bring more structure as well as research and development opportunities to a relatively
niche sub-field
