Performance evaluation of a bandwidth requirements reduction technique based on timely state update

Abstract

An important issue in distributed real-time simulation is to reduce the amount of data transmitted amongst distributed simulation nodes so that the state updates of simulation entities can be sent to other simulation nodes in a timely manner. To address this issue, we have previously proposed a consistency model to determine the update interval of entities based on their relative importance, a utility model to compute the relative importance of entities, and a flexible state update mechanism to ensure updating within these intervals and to balance the number of updates in each simulation frame. In this paper, we focus on the performance evaluation of these timely state update mechanisms. Using a battlefield benchmark, the performance is evaluated in terms of the total amount of data exchanged, the number of simulation frames skipped, and the number of go-through-accidents occurring during the simulation. The performance results indicate that the mechanisms can significantly reduce the bandwidth requirements while maintaining or even improving the consistency of the simulation.