A novel compact simulation interface specification

Abstract

Although the HLA distributed simulation standard has been widely applied, the RTIs in accordance with the standard usually do not take full account of the reliability of more than 100 HLA services; as a result they cannot be effectively applied to an unreliable network. On the basis of usual management services of HLA, this paper proposes a 6-service compact simulation interface specification (CSIS). Unlike the HLA declaration management based on “class”, CSIS directly deals with data, adopts the data filtering mechanism based on “channel”, and has the same characteristics of interoperability, reusability and scalability as the HLA. In many cases, it can replace the HLA to develop distributed simulations in a simpler way. Aiming at the typical demand of joint simulation between land and offshore systems over unreliable network in various complicated meteorological conditions, YHChannel, an implementation compliant with CSIS, is introduced, which deploys two channel servers in land and offshore respectively. This paper discusses the solution of the reliability of every service in YHChannel, and brings forward a useful communication strategy for unreliable network, which can reduce packet loss rate as well as transmission time by compressing, merging and retransmitting data packets. The experimental results show that when the packet loss rate of an unreliable network is reduced to 20 percent, YHChannel’s packet loss rate will be very small and approximately equal to zero. These ideas about CSIS and the communication strategy in YHChannel can be widely used in the sea-ground-sky-space interconnection between distributed software systems.