DATA DISTRIBUTION MANAGEMENT IN THE HLA Multidimensional Regions and Physically Correct Filtering

The goal of HLA Data Distribution Management (DDM) services is to limit the messages received by federates in large distributed federations to those messages of interest in order to reduce (1) the data set required to be processed by the receiving federate and (2) the message traffic over the network. If this functionality is provided in a manner that is efficient, it can significantly improve the performance and scalability of large distributed federations. We provide an overview of the fundamental DDM mechanisms, routing spaces with update and subscription regions, and show how DDM services interoperate with other HLA services to allow federates to discover objects and attributes of interest. We proceed to derive strategies for implementing physically correct filters to account for network latencies and object movement in the virtual environment. These strategies rely on mathematically derived extensions of update and subscription regions to optimize filter efficiency.