A dynamic sort-based DDM matching algorithm for HLA applications

Abstract

Simulation is a low-cost and safe alternative to solve complex problems in various areas. To promote reuse and interoperability of simulation applications and link geographically dispersed simulation components, distributed simulation was introduced. The High-Level Architecture (HLA) is the IEEE standard for distributed simulation. To optimize communication efficiency between simulation components, HLA defines a Data Distribution Management (DDM) service group for filtering out unnecessary data exchange. It relies on the computation of overlap between update and subscription regions, which is called “matching”. There are many existing matching algorithms, among which a sort-based approach improves efficiency by sorting region bounds before the actual matching process, and is found to outperform other existing matching algorithms in many situations. However, the existing algorithm performs matching for all regions in one round and cannot dynamically deal with a selective region modification without processing all the regions once again. Realizing that in many spatial applications, only a small subset of all regions are actually modified in each time step, this article proposes a dynamic sort-based matching algorithm to deal with this efficiently. Theoretical analysis has been carried out for the proposed algorithm and experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has significantly better performance than major existing matching algorithms at dynamic matching.