Optimistic Synchronization in HLA-Based Distributed Simulation

Xiaoguang Wang, Stephen John Turner, Malcolm Yoke Hean Low, Boon Ping Gan
2005 Simulation (San Diego, Calif.)  
With the wide use of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) simulation packages and the advent of the High Level Architecture (HLA) standard which supports interoperability and reusability, it is desirable to build distributed simulations by linking various types of simulation models developed using best-fit COTS packages. While almost all current work on integrating COTS packages and the HLA is based on conservative synchronization, it is worthwhile to investigate the optimistic synchronization
more » ... ch. The optimistic approach can exploit parallelism and achieve promising performance in situations where causality errors may occur but in fact seldom occur. In our paper, we introduce a rollback controller using a middleware approach to handle the complex rollback procedure on behalf of the simulation model. To solve the problem of an error in the 1.3 HLA interface specification, a new time advance algorithm is proposed that can fully utilize the benefits of optimistic synchronization. A comparison of performance between the conservative and optimistic synchronization approaches based on a typical reference model is also provided. The paper also describes a scalability study showing the experimental results for the two synchronization approaches as the number of simulation components increases.
doi:10.1177/0037549705054931 fatcat:rjnsxpqezbbh7dcrjcuwbae2ny