Beacons for locales

Abstract

In a multicast environment in which large-scale virtual environments are lt using locales and in which data from non-neighboring locales is ignored to minimize computation and local storage, a system is provided to find or track objects and their associated locales for locales to which a user is not listening by assigning the object a beacon and broadcasting the beacon in a subspace channel, with the beacon having the multicast address of the locale in which the sought-after object resides, thus to permit an upload of data from the particular locale. Beacons are doled out parsimoniously to objects one wants to find and objects one wants other people to find to minimize processing and data storage requirements. Ignored locales are thus located using a beacon broadcast in a subspace channel which in addition to broadcasting messages about itself to the locale it is in, also broadcasts messages into a subspace channel to others about itself and the multicast address of the locale it is in. In one embodiment, subspace channel information permits accessing non-neighboring locales which would normally be ignored due to the fact that they are not neighboring. Thus the beacon system permits keeping track of all objects possessing a beacon regardless of the locales in which they reside and regardless of whether or not the locales in which they reside are being accessed, such that objects are not lost due to the ignoring of locales by the multicasting system.