Abstract
In this paper, we propose an efficient network communication scheme tailored to the network virtual reality(NVR) system. We first present the architecture and implementation of CVRAT (collaborative virtual reality authoring tool). The design goal of CVRAT is to provide consistent and scalable shared virtual environments. To achieve this goal, we classify the network messages according to their reliability and latency requirements. These conflicting requirements lead us to conceive a heterogeneous communication scheme which provides the unicast and three different multicast transport services; unreliable multicast, receiver-driven reliable multicast, fast reliable multicast. Each protocol has trade-offs in reliability, latency and bandwidth usage. The characteristics are analyzed by several experiments. Finally, applying this communication method to multi-participant battle-field tank simulation, we show the efficacy of proposed heterogeneous transport mechanism.