Space-time matching algorithms for interest management in distributed virtual environments

Interest management in Distributed Virtual Environments (DVEs) is a data-filtering technique designed to reduce bandwidth consumption and therefore enhances the scalability of the system. This technique usually involves a process called interest matching, which determines what data should be sent to the participants as well as what data should be filtered. Although most of the existing interest matching approaches have been shown to meet their runtime performance requirements, they have a fundamental disadvantage-they perform interest matching at discrete time intervals. As a result, they would fail to report events between discrete timesteps. If participants of the DVE ignore these missing events, they would most likely perform incorrect simulations. This article presents a new approach called space-time interest matching, which aims to capture the missing events between discrete timesteps. Although this approach requires additional matching effort, a number of novel algorithms are developed to significantly improve its runtime efficiency. © 2014 ACM.