Synchronized data distribution management in distributed simulations

Data distribution management (DDM) is concerned with the problem of efficiently distributing state information among the entities in a distributed simulation. While heavily studied in the DIS community for training applications using real time synchronization, this problem has received considerably less attention for logical time simulations, and little performance data has appeared in this regard. The paper is concerned with evaluating the performance of a logical time synchronized DDM mechanism. A DDM algorithm based on the services specified in the DoD High Level Architecture (HLA) using routing spaces is described, as well as its implementation on a network of workstations environment. Performance measurements indicate that the time overhead to provide correct logical time synchronization of the DDM mechanisms is small, relative to network communication overheads, suggesting that logical time synchronized DDM mechanisms can perform as efficiently as real time synchronized mechanisms in networked workstation environments.