Decreasing Communication Latency through Dynamic Measurement, Analysis, and Partitioning for Distributed Virtual Simulations

Abstract

Communication in distributed simulations is highly relevant due to latencies cumulatively introduced in the execution time of such simulations; these latencies are caused by the transfer of data throughout networks. High-Level Architecture (HLA) is a well-known standard used to organize and keep the consistency of distributed virtual simulations. Nevertheless, although the HLA framework presents solutions to decrease communication overhead for simulations, it does not solve the communication issues that are pertinent to the network distances among federates and the Run-Time Infrastructure (RTI) in large-scale environments. Due to the relevance of load balancing for distributed simulations, many solutions have been proposed, but such approaches just consider communication load partially in their schemes or are limited. To minimize the communication overhead of HLA distributed simulations, a hierarchical dynamic balancing scheme composed of three phases was designed; however, even though the balancing scheme reacts properly to run-time load changes, its load analysis does detect all the imbalances after measuring simulations' communication load. Thus, an extension is proposed to improve the detection of communication imbalances, as well as the redistribution of federates, so the balancing scheme can better react to communication load measurements gathered from each federate. To observe the benefits of the proposed communication balancing scheme and its extension, extensive large-scale experiments were realized. The results show that the scheme reduces considerably the amount of communication overhead, and the extension enables the detection of communication imbalances by modifying the decision-making technique in the balancing system.