We investigate the scalability of distributed virtual environments (DVEs) based on a structured peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay. We focus on network load and message routing latency. To this end, we study a prototypical DVE consisting of a simple game scenario and a P2P architecture based on Pastry and Scribe as proposed by Knutsson et al. [1]. Both our theoretical analysis and simulation results show that under constant population density, the network load is constant except for the overhead messages incurred by the overlay protocol. The overall network load per host as well as the message routing latency grows logarithmically with the number of hosts; this is in partial contradiction to Knutsson et al.'s results. We propose a resolution to this contradiction.
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