Peer-assisted texture streaming in metaverses

Abstract

User-extensible metaverses need an effective way to disseminate massive and dynamic 3D contents (i.e., meshes, textures, animations, etc.) to end users, and at the same time maintain a low consumption of server bandwidth. Peer-topeer (or peer-assisted) technologies have been widely considered as a desirable complementary solution to efficaciously offload servers in large-scale media streaming applications. However, due to both the bandwidth constraints of heterogeneous users and unpredictable access patterns of latencysensitive 3D contents, it is very challenging to cut the server bandwidth cost in metaverses. In this paper, we propose a peer-assisted texture streaming architecture to minimize the server bandwidth consumption without degrading the end-user satisfaction. We propose a game-theoretic peer selection strategy which achieves a good trade-off between performance and complexity. Our algorithm is light-weight, and can efficiently utilize the bandwidth of users in a fully decentralized manner by enabling each peer (i.e., user) to quickly select its content providers which can satisfy the requests of the peer within the latency constraint of the content. We evaluate our algorithm through an extensive comparison study based on simulations using realistic data (i.e., avatar mobility traces and textures) collected from Second Life. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively reduce the server bandwidth consumption without degrading the user experience.

Joserlin

“…Moreover, this work does not distinguish on-demand and prefetch requests. Liang et al [18] used FIFO queue as a service policy. A request that cannot be served before its deadline is rejected and resubmitted to another neighbor until its deadline is reached.…”

“…We adopt the reject-and-retry technique used by Liang et al [18] and Yang et al [28] to balance the load across neighbors: when an on-demand request is rejected, the requester can quickly retry it to other neighbors until either the request is served or its deadline is reached, by when the request is sent to the server as a last resort. The reject-and-retry technique can effectively balance the load at neighbors, but it does not perform scheduling.…”

“…The application of these techniques, however, mainly focuses on linear media, such as video, where user interactions are limited. As new classes of interactive media applications emerge, researchers have started to investigate the use of P2P techniques on streaming these interactive media content, including networked virtual environment (NVE) [9,18] and zoomable video [21].…”

“…Non-linear access pattern leads to a clear difference between on-demand and prefetch requestson-demand requests are caused by prefetch misses and have much tighter deadlines. Many existing works do not distinguish the two [26,29,18,28], and thus on-demand requests' deadlines are often missed due to unnecessary contentions with prefetch requests. Solutions that consider the two separately [2] do not study the interplay between the two systematically, particularly how scheduling of prefetch requests can benefit on-demand requests.…”

Challenges in supporting non-linear and non-continuous media access in P2P systems

“…Due to the constant prefetch miss caused by non-linear access, we have two types of requests: prefetch request and fetch request, which has a playback deadline of 0. In many existing works [9], fetch requests are served by the streaming server. In cases where non-linear access is intrinsic (e.g., virtual environment, 3D mesh, zoomable video, etc.…”