Quality of service management in distributed interactive virtual environment

The Distributed Interactive Virtual Environment (DIVE) is an experimental platform for the development of virtual environments, user interfaces and applications based on shared 3D synthetic environments. DIVE is especially tuned to multi-user applications, where several networked participants interact over a network.; The Advanced Communication Engineering Centre (ACEC), the University of Western Ontario (UWO) participates, together with the Multimedia Communications Research Lab (MCRLab) of the University of Ottawa and the Communications Research Centre (CRC) of Industry Canada, in a research project funded by the Canadian Network for the Advancement of Research, Industry and Education (CANARIE). This project involves the development, performance analysis and testing of DIVE based applications for tele-training and electronic commerce, as well as the definition of Quality of Service (QoS) management architectures for the support of such applications over an IPv6 capable Internet. The applications and technology are tested through CANARIE' s National Test Network.; The work presented in this thesis is part of this research project. More specifically, the work presented herein is concerned with the following: (1) An understanding of the traffic behaviour, sensitivity to network impairments (bit error insertion, packet losses, etc) and effects of network traffic loading on a virtual reality application designed on the basis of the DIVE. This application has been developed by the Ottawa team and deals with technical training; the training concerns Newbridge's MainStreet ATM switches family. (2) The development and evaluation of realistic solutions of Quality of Service (QoS) management for this application using the recent IETF differentiated service framework.