Efficient Synchronized Data Distribution Management in Distributed Simulations

Data distribution management (DDM) is a mechanism to interconnect data producers and data consumers in a distributed application. Applications ranging from rich distributed virtual gaming environments on the Internet to simulations of complex physical systems use some sort of DDM. For each message produced, DDM determines the set of data consumers interested in receiving the message and delivers it to those consumers. This book focuses on DDM techniques for parallel and distributed discrete event simulations. Thus far, researchers have treated synchronization of events (i.e. time management) and DDM independent of each other, which may lead to incorrect order of messages, and consequently non-reproducible or even worse, invalid simulation results. Time-managed DDM ensures that changes in the routing of messages from producers to consumers occur in a correct sequence. Also time managed DDM avoids non-determinism in the simulation execution, which may result in non-repeatable executions. This book shows how to realize efficient time managed DDM mechanisms that maintain low computational and message overheads even for large scale parallel and distributed systems.