329 | | We will demonstrate a second slice implementing network support for multi-party virtual worlds. |
| 329 | At GEC-10, we demonstrated he operation of the full five node configuration of Supercharged PlanetLab Platforms (SPP). |
| 330 | These are deployed in Sal Lake City, Kansas City, Washington DC, Houston and Atlanta. We demonstrated two slices |
| 331 | running on the full five node SPP configuration. The first is the product of a collaboration with Brighten Godfrey |
| 332 | of the University of Illinois, on an experimental network concept called Slick Packets. In the Slick Packets framework, |
| 333 | packets carry an encoding for a set of alternate routes that can be used in the event that the primary route for |
| 334 | a packet fails at some intermediate router. We have implemented a code option for Slick Packets for the SPPs' Network |
| 335 | Processor Engine, enabling multigigabit forwarding rates, even for minimum size packets. More details of the demonstration |
| 336 | can be found in the attached presentation slides. |
| 337 | |
| 338 | |
| 339 | The second application demonstrated at GEC-10 was the Forest overlay network architecture, designed to support |
| 340 | high quality virtual worlds. This demonstration used all five SPPs plus twenty-five PlanetLab nodes and |
| 341 | included 100 "avatar-bots" that used the Forest network services to exchange periodic status reports. In this |
| 342 | demonstration, the avatars used region-based multicasts to transmit their status information and to "tune in" to |
| 343 | status reports from other nearby avatars. The demonstration also included a monitoring application and remote |
| 344 | visualization that allowed demo participants to observe the avatars moving within the virtual world and to see |
| 345 | how the clustering of avatars affected network traffic levels. More details can be found in the |
| 346 | attached presentation slides. |