Exploitation of event-semantics for distributed publish/subscribe systems in massively multiuser virtual environments

Triggered by the fast evolving technical capabilities for implementing distributed global scale applications, online games have grown to a huge industry in recent years. Particularly, Massive Multiuser Virtual Environments (MMVEs), which allow for simultaneous activity of thousands of players in a virtual world, have been tremendously successful. Current architectures, however, use centralized approaches, which obviously do not scale beyond a certain point. Distributed event-based systems are a promising approach to reach both, performing and scalable architectures. The potential of this approach can only be fully exploited if event semantics is used to optimize event handling. Existing approaches actually do this to some degree, but typically in a very application specific manner. There is no generally applicable framework for classifying events according to their relevant semantic properties. In this paper, we propose a generally applicable classification of events as a first step on the way to flexibly adaptable generic event management systems. We exemplify the relevance of our semantic properties by classifying typical events in an existing MMVE. We discuss existing optimization strategies based on our semantic classification and outline a corresponding architecture.