原文链接：http://vast.sourceforge.net/
VAST is a light-weight network library to support scalable peer-to-peer (P2P) virtual environment / virtual world applications such as Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs). It is based on the research of Voronoi-based Overlay Network (VON) published originally at the 2004 ACM SIGCOMM workshop Netgames, and later in IEEE Network.
Existing MMOGs rely on client-server / server-cluster architectures that have inherent scalability limits and are difficult to design, expensive to deploy. VAST intends to provide an open source alternative to build scalable, low-cost, easily deployable MMP virtual environment applications. VAST will have these properties due to a new algorithm to find neighboring nodes and maintain neighbor relationships in a P2P environment.
The main problem VAST tries to address is to find the right "neighbors" (that is, solving the "neighbor discovery problem") in a P2P environment, and the technical difficulties in developing VAST will be to maintain the consistency and robustness of P2P topology in face of latency and node failures. This will be addressed by the VON algorithm with extensive testing and tuning.
VAST is a dynamically linked library (in both C++ and Java) that provides two simple functions: a node may join the P2P network by specifying a 2D-coordinate and a visibility radius in the virtual environment. In return, VAST provides up-to-date information on the position coordinates and visibility radii of neighboring nodes within view. Further use of the knowledge about neighboring nodes is left to the application developers.
Another important aspect for VAST is research and educational, where it will be built as a network middleware consisted of three major components: network-layer, protocol and simulator. Each is intended to be as self-contained as possible, and may be developed separately by different parties. This will allow new algorithms or new simulators to be tried and tested for VAST's properties and performance.
VAST utilizes existing open source software whenever possible. Specifically, Steven Fortune's sweepline algorithm is currently used for constructing Voronoi diagrams, and ACE is used as the underlying network layer to provide cross-platform extensibility.
Demo: both C++ (for Win32) and Java applet visualizations of VAST are available on the
Source Code: VAST is open source under the GNU's Lesser General Public License (LGPL). The current version is available for download.
- Shun-Yun Hu, Jui-Fa Chen and Tsu-Han Chen, "VON: A Scalable Peer-to-Peer Network for Virtual Environments," IEEE Network, vol. 20, no. 4, Jul./Aug. 2006, pp. 22-31. [paper] [slides] [IEEE]
- Shun-Yun Hu, Shao-Chen Chang, and Jehn-Ruey Jiang, "Voronoi State Management for Peer-to-Peer Massively Multiplayer Online Games," in Proc. 4th IEEE Intl. Workshop on Networking Issues in Multimedia Entertainment (NIME), Jan. 2008. [paper] [slides]
- Shun-Yun Hu, "Spatial Publish Subscribe," in Proc. IEEE Virtual Reality (IEEE VR) workshop Massively Multiuser Virtual Environment (MMVE'09), Mar. 2009. [paper] [slides]
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