Eighth IEEE International Symposium on Distributed Simulation and Real-Time Applications

Growing demand for use of Internet/Web-based services in real-time distributed virtual simulation (RT-DVS) and other real-time applications is fueling extensive interest in overlay multicast protocols. These applications demand Quality of Service (QoS) and many-to-many multicast services that are not available in underlying Internet services today. This paper describes an early implementation of a... View full abstract»

The high level architecture (HLA) standard developed by the Department of Defense in the United States is a key technology to perform distributed simulation. Inside the HLA framework, many different simulators (termed federates) may be interconnected to create a single, more complex simulator (federation). Data distribution management (DDM) is an optional subset of services that controls which fed... View full abstract»

Group communication in large-scale interactive applications such as real-time conferencing and collaboration, networked virtual environments (e.g. massively multi-player games) requires efficient, low-overhead group communication mechanisms. In this paper we consider the application-level (or end-system) multicast and propose a stateless group communication mechanism together with its tree buildin... View full abstract»

The network simulator ns-2 implements both wireless networks and emulation — a feature that allows to simulate a network environment among real stations. However, the real-time requirements of a network emulation introduce an inaccurate timing behavior of the simulator scheduler. These timing errors have a negative impact on the performance of network protocols in ns-2. Even more, they lead to fal... View full abstract»

We describe a museum installation that explains the technical and mental process that sonar operators undergo when identifying underwater sounds in the surroundings of a submarine. The installation places the public in a cramped space composed of several coupled interactive stations offering different perspectives onto a virtual environment representing a part of the Baltic Sea. The virtual enviro... View full abstract»

Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVE) are a form of telecommunication technology that bring together co-located or remote, participants within a spatial social and information context. Collaboration occurs between people and often around shared objects. Fruitful cooperation is helped by natural and intuitive ways of communicating and sharing, for which responsiveness and consistency are leading... View full abstract»

A collaborative, haptic, audio and visual environment (C-HAVE) consists of a network of nodes. Each node in the C-HAVE world contributes to the shared environment with some virtual objects. These can be static, e.g., a sculpture or the ground, or dynamic, e.g., an object that can be virtually manipulated. We aim at developing a heterogeneous scalable architecture for large collaborative haptics en... View full abstract»

One of the challenges for 3D multi-user virtual simulation environments (3D MUVEs) developers is to keep the shared virtual simulation environment synchronized among all the participating users´ terminals. Support to 3DMUVEs through traditional client-server communication model offers simpler management but can lead to bottlenecks and higher latencies. Peer-to-peer communication model, on the othe... View full abstract»

Distributed Interactive Applications (DIAs) have been gaining commercial success in recent years due to the widespread appeal of networked multiplayer computer games. Within these games, participants interact with each other and their environment, producing complex behavioural patterns that evolve over time. These patterns are non-linear, and often appear to exhibit dependencies under certain cond... View full abstract»

State-of-the-art Massively Multiplayer Games such as EverQuest and Ultima Online are currently implemented as client-server systems. Although this approach allows the development of commercially viable MMG services, the costs associated with running a scalable client-server MMG service are often too high for small companies or research projects. This paper proposes FreeMMG, a mixed peer-to-peer an... View full abstract»

The hybrid strategy-based modeling approach is a method for reducing the number of network packets that need to be transmitted to maintain global consistency in Distributed Interactive Applications. It combines a short-term model such as dead reckoning with a long-term strategy model. A key aspect of this approach is to determine strategies that users adopt in navigating the simulated environment ... View full abstract»

The development of simulators for complex systems like nuclear power plants is a hard task where many different factors have to be considered. This paper presents a simulation environment composed by a simulation kernel and supported by a set of tools and simulation models that allow the real-time simulation of the control room of nuclear power plants. The developed simulators allow the training o... View full abstract»

The Experimentation Command and Control Interface (XC2I) project has developed an architecture for a Web-service based viewer/controller for use with distributed simulations supporting military experiments. As part of this activity, a capability for Interest Management with three functions is being created. The functions are Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), Area of Interest Management (AOIM), and... View full abstract»

Modelling and simulation permeate all areas of business, science and engineering and increasingly complex simulation systems often require huge computing resources and data sets that are geographically distributed. The widely adopted platform for building distributed simulations is the High Level Architecture (HLA). Deficiencies associated with HLA have been well discussed in the literature. The a... View full abstract»

In this paper we describe a Grid-enabled system for monitoring HLA-based applications to enable load balancing by migration of federates. The monitoring is based on the OCM-G system [2].We show how the design concepts of the OCM-G enable easy adaptation to monitoring of HLA, C++-based applications. The solution presented in this paper is transparent to the user application and does not require any... View full abstract»

Running a large-scale HLA-based simulation in a distributed environment may require large amounts of computing resources at geographically different locations. A simulation running for a long period of time may result in imbalance of load levels at different computing hosts, hence leading to degradation of performance. Performance typically improves if the workload can be equally distributed among... View full abstract»