Quality of Service for Peer-to-Peer Based Networked Virtual Environments

This paper describes how quality of service (QoS) enabled overlay multicast architectures using peer-to-peer (P2P) networks can enhance the experience of end-users in networked virtual environments (NVE). We show how IP multicast, which offers an easy to use API for implementing NVE but is not widely deployed, can be made available to end-users by bridging it transparently with P2P networks. We describe how different P2P and application level multicast (ALM) architectures can be extended with QoS mechanisms using our proposed OM-QoS (overlay multicast QoS) architecture. The presented approach allows users to experience QoS for NVE such as group-based multimedia broadcasting and distributed multiplayer games.