Applications such as Second Life require massive deployment of servers worldwide to support a large number of users. We investigate experimentally how Peer-to-Peer (P2P) communication could help cut the deployment cost and increase the scalability of Social Virtual Worlds such as Second Life. We design and build a communication infrastructure that distributes the management of the virtual world among user resources using a structured P2P network. Our communication infrastructure is implemented on the top of Kad, the P2P network that supports millions of eMule users. We then use avatar and object traces collected on Second Life to perform a realistic emulation of P2P Second Life over the Internet. We show that, despite using a standard P2P solution, P2P Second Life is mostly consistent, persistent and scalable. However, the latency avatars experience to recover from an inconsistent view of the virtual world can become disturbing for very large numbers of participants and objects. We analyze and discuss this limitation and give recommendation on how to design P2P Social Virtual Worlds.
