Performance evaluation of compromised synchronization control mechanism for distributed virtual environment (DVE)

Abstract

Synchronization in a distributed virtual environment (DVE) involves mechanisms to ensure a consistent view of a virtual world for all participants. Most applications in the DVE are related to collaborative activities that include non-contention and contention cases. Using transmission of update messages is suitable enough to support synchronization for only non-contention activity. The contention activity requires an additional mechanism to control accessing a common object for synchronization. In this paper, we present the compromised synchronization control mechanism to support both non-contention and contention activities. The mechanism employs frequent update event and multiple-lock checking to control the synchronization. Frequent update event is used to support a dynamic virtual world for non-contention activity. Multiple-lock checking is embedded to ensure consistency when accessing the common object is required simultaneously for the contention event. Performance measurement of the compromised synchronization is provided by simulation in terms of locking time, sampling event, number of logical processes, and traffic tolerance. Prototype application is also implemented to compare the result in a small scale level. Based on the simulation and experimental results, the compromised sychronization control mechanism is capable to support up to 100 participants for the non-contention activity. It provides a good performance of supporting the contention activity in a small scale. The mechanism is considered suitable for collaborative application where contention is considered a critical event.