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An alternative time management mechanism for distributed simulations

Published: 01 April 2005 Publication History

Abstract

Over the past few years, there has been a keen interest in the management of time in distributed simulation environments. Previous emphasis in time management (TM) services has been based on time stamp ordering, which is both computation and bandwidth intensive. This article discusses an alternative approach to time management based on causal ordering. Traditional causal ordering protocols incur a large amount of communication overhead, which is generally of the order of N2 for a distributed system of N processes. A new causal ordering protocol proposed by the authors, the Modified Schiper-Eggli-Sandoz (MSES) protocol, is presented in this article. This new protocol minimizes the control information overhead of causal ordering by using the direct dependency tracking technique. The MSES protocol works well in both unicast and multicast environments, without relying on information about the underlying network topology and communication pattern among the processes of the distributed system. The MSES protocol has been successfully implemented as a middleware on top of DMSO RTI. Experiments have been conducted to benchmark the performance of the new time management mechanism with respect to the existing TM mechanisms available in DMSO RTI. The simulation scenarios of the experiments vary with different degrees of inter-federate dependency and federate event granularities. The ordering limitations of the causality based TM mechanism are addressed in this article and the trade-off of the degree of event ordering and execution speed of simulations is discussed.

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    cover image ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation
    ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation  Volume 15, Issue 2
    April 2005
    66 pages
    ISSN:1049-3301
    EISSN:1558-1195
    DOI:10.1145/1060576
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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 01 April 2005
    Published in TOMACS Volume 15, Issue 2

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    Author Tags

    1. Distributed simulation
    2. causal order
    3. high level architecture
    4. time management

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