Interest Management for Collaborative Environments Through Dividing Their Shared State

Abstract

Not all participants in a collaborative virtual environment (CVE) need to be informed of every other participant's activities. The technique used for filtering irrelevant messages is known as interest management, which has to minimize network traffic and to reduce the burden of clients. However, considering the CVE shared state maintenance, interest management is nothing else than a disruption of the perfect case where every CVE participant maintains the identical copy of the state. In this paper we present an interest management technique that organizes the shared state into domains and subdomains and enables clients to express their interest in particular sub-domains only. This approach specifies an interest management in a general way and it can be used for a wide range of CVE applications. Key ideas are being implemented as part of General Variables (GV) library and verified in our testbed CVE system for social interaction called e-Agora.