Performance of standard and modified network protocols in a real-time application

Recent advances in computer and communications technologies have made possible the interconnection of large number of real-time training simulators via local area networks. The self-healing nature of real-time networked simulation has been found to allow for a modification based on discarding old packets whenever new state updates become available. The performance benefits obtained by implementing this modification at both the application and data-link layers are presented for two medium-access network protocols: ETHERNET and GBRAM. An analysis of a phenomenon, called the greedy node problem, in distributed simulation networks is presented.