An Efficient Sort-Based DDM Matching Algorithm for HLA Applications with a Large Spatial Environment

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. In this paper, we propose an efficient sort-based DDM matching algorithm for HLA applications with a large spatial environment. A theoretical analysis of our algorithm concludes that it should have good storage and computational scalability. The experimental results have verified the theoretical conclusions by showing that our algorithm has much less storage requirement than the original sortbased matching algorithm and generally has the best computational performance when compared with region-based and the original sort-based matching algorithms.

Space-Time Matching Algorithms for Interest Management in Distributed Virtual Environments

“…Petty and Morse [2004] have provided a theoretical analysis of the computational complexity of the interest matching process. The paper showed by reduction from Binary Search that the matching process requires a total time with a lower bound in (nlogn) and a upper bound in O(n 2 ), where n is the number of runtime data declarations made by the federates.…”

“…Recently, more robust matching algorithms based on dimension reduction were proposed [Raczy et al 2005;Liu et al 2005;Pan et al 2007]. These algorithms are designed specifically for HLA-compliant systems and thus adopt the use of rectangular auras (i.e., regions of the HLA).…”

“…In environments where entities make relatively small movements between consecutive timesteps, interest matching can be processed in linear time. Pan et al [2007] also designed a sort-based matching algorithm for HLA-compliant systems. The efficiency of this approach relies on the assumption that only a small portion of the entities are updated at each timestep of simulations.…”

Interest management for distributed virtual environments

“…An effort has been made in Petty and Morse [2000] to prove that the interest matching process in DDM is not NP-complete by exhibiting a naive polynomial time algorithm (i.e., brute-force interest matching) for the process. In a related effort, have provided a theoretical analysis of the computational complexity of the interest matching process.…”

“…In environments where entities make relatively small movements between consecutive timesteps, interest matching can be processed in linear time. Pan et al [2007] also proposed a sort-based matching algorithm. The efficiency of this approach relies on the assumption that only a small portion of the entities are updated at each timestep of simulations.…”