A hybrid approach to data distribution management

One of the services provided by the High Level Architecture (HLA) Run-Time Infrastructure (RTI) is data distribution management (DDM), which aims to make data communication more efficient by sending data to only those federates requiring the data. Several DDM methods, notably region and grid-based, have been proposed and some of them have been implemented in RTI. We first briefly discuss grid-based and region-based DDM and their advantages and disadvantages, and then a new hybrid approach is proposed. Our simulations show that in some situations, the hybrid approach can reduce both the number of irrelevant messages of the grid-based DDM and the number of matching of the region-based approach.