We propose a peer-to-peer system that supports distributed virtual world applications. For these applications, the connections between directly neighboring peers are of the utmost importance. To minimize wide area network traffic and average latency, peers that belong to the same subnet, are grouped together, and these groups are interconnected via wide area connections. To build up and maintain this optimized peer-to-peer structure, we developed a set of protocols that efficiently handle the joining and leaving of peers as well as failure situations. Peers are arranged in the logical ring structure using a two-step discovery and join procedure. The first step uses broadcast messages to discover peers in a local subnet, followed by a local join. If no peer answers in the local subnet, a remote join is performed. With the implemented recovery procedures, our peer-to-peer system can survive multi-node failures in a local subnet as well as the failure of an entire subnet.
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