Hierarchical Federation Community and Time Management

Abstract

It has been stated that the current definitions of High Level Architecture and implementations of Runtime Infrastructure do not deal with all the current issues of interoperability. Hierarchical Federation Community (HFC), in which federations are organized into hierarchies, offers a means of enhancing interoperability of federation for large-scale distributed simulation. Previous emphasis in Time Management (TM) services has been based on time stamp ordering, which is both computation and communication intensive. We present a TM mechanism based on causal ordering for Federate Proxy enabled HFC using divide-and-conquer approach. The TM mechanism can avoid causal anomaly between messages, which is proven. Moreover, some advantages are listed, e.g. potential of performance improvement and supporting interoperability among heterogeneous federations utilizing different internal TM mechanisms. Finally, experiments have been conducted to benchmark the performance of the new TM mechanism with respect to the existing TM mechanism.