Distributed simulation communication through an active real-time database

Abstract

We present a communication architecture that uses a distributed active real-time database system as its communication medium. The proposed architecture incorporates a database as the shared "whiteboard" through which every participating node may communicate by writing and reading data. This approach is useful in complex sharing applications such as distributed real-time simulations. The architecture deals with performance problems inherited from databases and distribution by using eventual consistency to increase predictability and availability of local data access. As a filtering mechanism, active functionality is used to control complexity. This whiteboard communication architecture is suitable for distributed real-time simulations, and a single-node prototype implementation of such a database in conjunction with the distributed simulation standard high level architecture (HLA) has shown encouraging results. The prototype is being extended to multinode simulation to gain additional experience before the communication architecture is deployed to actual systems.