Building and Querying a P2P Virtual World

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems are known to provide excellent scalability in a networked environment. One peer is introduced to the system by each participant. However current P2P applications can only provide file sharing and other forms of relatively simple data communications, and, in this paper, we demonstrate how this limitation can be bridged by indexing and querying a 3D virtual-world on a dynamic distributed network. We present an algorithm for 3D range queries as well as an algorithm for nearest neighbor queries. We also show how to build such a complex application from the ground level of a P2P routing algorithm.