Multi-resolution Next Location Prediction for Distributed Virtual Environments

Computing performance of today's graphics hardware grows fast as well as amount of rendered data. Modern graphics engines enable a possibility to use an arbitrary number of textures with arbitrary resolutions. On the other hand, high quality distributed 3D virtual environments can't exploit the computation power due to the limited network bandwidth. The problem mainly appears just in case the designers of such environments use high resolution textures. To overcome this streaming bottleneck an efficient prefetching scheme should be proposed. Instead of blind greedy scheduling policy we propose a scheme which exploits movement history of users to realize a look-ahead policy which enables the clients to retrieve potentially rendered data in advance. The prediction itself is established by Markov chains due to their ability to fast learning in conjunction with 2-state predictor which increases ability of the scheduling system to adapt to new habits of particular users.