Distributed virtual environments: from client server to cloud and P2P architectures

Distributed Virtual Environments (DVEs), like Massively Multiplayer Online Games(MMOG) are attracting millions of users from all over the world. However, as the number of simultaneous users keeps growing, the current used Client/Server infrastructure technologies are showing their limits on the side of the practicality and applicability. As a consequence, novel solutions based on Cloud and P2P architectures have been recently proposed. While Cloud Architectures permit to overcome the over provisioning problem of C/S architectures, the advent of home xDSL connection capability permits to explore the capability of P2P approaches to design the infrastructure of next-generation DVEs. The use of P2P distributed infrastructures permits to exploit the inherent scalability of DVE, their robustness and self-organizing properties. However, this solution has to face with additional related challenges such as consistency, persistence and limited hardware capabilities of the peers. This paper discusses the main research challenges and reviews the main DVE architectures proposed in the last years.