Flexible State Update Mechanism for Large-Scale Distributed Wargame Simulations

Large-scale wargame simulations may involve tens of thousands of entities and generally run on distributed simulation nodes. An important issue in constructing these applications is to reduce the amount of data transmitted among the distributed simulation nodes so that the network and the simulation nodes will not be flooded by the state update messages. To this end, we first propose a timeliness condition on how frequently the state updates of a local simulation entity need to be sent to other remote simulation nodes. A fleXible state update mechanism is then proposed to ensure the update intervals of the entities meet the required timeliness update condition and, in the meantime, balance the number of entities that need to be updated in each simulation time step (referred to here as the frame). EXperiments with a distributed wargame simulation indicate that the proposed mechanism can significantly reduce the number of messages sent over the network while still maintaining the simulation fidelity.