ARA: An aggregate region assignment algorithm for resource minimisation and load distribution in virtual worlds

Scalability and consistency are fundamental issues to deal with in large scale distributed virtual environments (DVEs). To make a VE scalable, it is usually partitioned into a number of regions and processed by a set of dedicated servers. Static configurations are unable to handle dynamic load, and therefore, dynamic strategies are widely investigated and explored. A number of strategies can be found in the literature targeting either scalability or consistency and the applications requiring both were demanding a new infrastructure. In our previous work , we proposed a hierarchical infrastructure for the development of scalable and consistent virtual worlds. The work in this paper is carried out as an extension to our previous work and presents an algorithm for aggregate region assignment. The proposed algorithm performs exhaustive aggregations of regions for achieving load as balanced as possible in DVEs. Simulations in MATLAB show that the proposed algorithm and aggregate strategies achieve the best possible load distribution among the servers while maintaining regular and contiguous areas for assignments. It utilises intelligent techniques and greatly reduces the aggregation process.