Date of Award

1-1-2010

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Organizational Unit

Daniel Felix Ritchie School of Engineering and Computer Science

First Advisor

Christopher Gauthier-Dickey, Ph.D.

Second Advisor

Matthew Rutherford

Third Advisor

Ramakrishna Thurimella

Keywords

Communication protocol, Location aware, Networked virtual environments, Peer-to-peer, Voice

Abstract

Multiparty voice communication, where multiple people can communicate in a group, is an important component of networked virtual environments (NVEs), especially in many types of online games. While most research has been conducted on one-to-one communication, we focus on group communication. In this dissertation, we present the first measurement study on the characteristics of multiparty voice communications and develop a model of the talking and silence periods observed during multiparty communication. Over a total of 5 months, we measured over 11,000 sessions on an active multi-party voice communication server to quantify the characteristics of communication generated by game players, including group sizes, packet distributions, user and session frequencies, and speaking (and silence) durations. Further, we develop a model for multiparty voice communication that can be used for future research, simulation, network engineering, and game development work. Next, we propose a peer-to-peer protocol that uses Gabriel graphs, a subgraph of Delaunay-triangulations, to provide scalable multiparty voice communication. In addition, our protocol uses positional information so that voice data can be accurately modeled to listeners to increase the immersiveness of their experience. Our simulations show that the algorithms scale well even in densely populated areas, while prioritizing the sending of voice packets to the closest listeners of a speaker rst, thus behaving as users expect. We also develop a security framework that prevents common attacks. Finally, we implement our protocol and put it through exhaustive validation, where we use the model that we generated using our multiparty voice communication model.

Publication Statement

Copyright is held by the author. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.

Rights Holder

Gabor Papp

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Format

application/pdf

Language

en

File Size

128 p.

Discipline

Computer science

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