A redistribution scheme centred on communication delay for distributed virtual simulations

Communication latencies directly influence the performance of distributed virtual simulations due to existent dependencies between simulation elements. The High Level Architecture (HLA) was designed to organize these simulations and reduce communication overhead. Even though the framework successfully manages data distribution, it is not concerned of communication distances and the network topology, which generate mostly of the delays in simulations. In order to provide a solution for organizing distribution simulations according to communication aspects, many approaches have been proposed. The approaches that provide a broader solution consider the proximity of resources in their redistribution algorithms. Even though these schemes considerably improves simulation performance, they are based on static characteristics of networking resources. Thus, a redistribution scheme is proposed to include communication delay as the main balancing metric and to detect the dynamic changes in systems' communication load. Experiments have been performed to compare the proposed scheme with the previous distributed scheme and to determine the effectiveness of using delay for balancing HLA-based simulations.