Theme, Scope, and Motivation

The rapid growth and popularity of networked virtual environments (NVEs) such as Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) in recent years have spawned a series of research interests in constructing such large-scale virtual environments. For increasing scalability and decreasing the cost of management and deployment, more and more studies propose using peer-to-peer (P2P) architectures to construct large-scale NVEs for games, multimedia virtual worlds and other applications. The goal of such research is to support an Earth-scale virtual environment or to make hosting virtual worlds more affordable than existing client-server approaches. However, existing solutions for consistency control, persistent data storage, multimedia data dissemination, and cheat-prevention may not be straightforwardly adapted to such new environments, novel ideas and designs thus are needed to realize the potential of P2P-based NVEs.

The theme of this workshop is to solicit original and previously unpublished new ideas on the construction and realization of P2P-based NVEs, with a focus to facilitate discussions and idea exchanges by both academics and practitioners. All papers accepted for the workshop will be included in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library and will be included in the proceedings published by the IEEE Computer Society.

Topics of Interest

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• P2P systems and infrastructures
• Applications of P2P systems
• Performance evaluation of P2P systems
• Trust and security issues in P2P systems
• Network support for P2P systems
• Fault tolerance in P2P systems
• Efficient P2P resource lookup and sharing
• Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs) and related issues
• Constructions of P2P overlays for NVEs
• Multicast for P2P NVEs
• P2P NVE content distribution
• 3D streaming for P2P NVEs
• Voice communication on P2P NVEs
• Persistent storage for P2P NVEs
• Security and cheat-prevention mechanisms for P2P games
• Data structures and queries for P2P NVEs
• Consistency control for P2P NVEs
• Design considerations for P2P NVEs
• Prototypes of P2P NVEs
• P2P control for mobile NVEs
• P2P NVE applications on mobile devices

Important Dates

Paper Submission:                July 24, 2007 (Extended)

Author Notification: August 24, 2007

Camera Ready Copy Due:     September 2, 2007