An exponential search enhanced dynamic sort-based interest matching algorithm for interest management in distributed simulation

Abstract Interest management is employed in most distributed simulation to filter irrelevant messages on network and is essential for the performance and scalability of simulation systems. In High-Level Architecture (HLA), the data distribution management (DDM) adopts an interest matching algorithm to filter unnecessary communications among federates by computing the overlap statuses between the update and subscription regions. In many spatial applications, only a portion of regions changes gradually at each time step. Hence, dynamic matching for selective modified regions is necessary. The dynamic sort-based matching algorithm has proved to be the most efficient. However, the existing dynamic sort-based matching algorithms do not separate modified regions from static regions, which will produce large amounts of unnecessary comparisons and swap operations between modified and static regions. To solve the problem, we propose an exponential search enhanced dynamic sort-based interest matching algorithm called EDSIM. In EDSIM, (1) the modified regions are separated from static regions; thus, the latter are independent from the sorting operations; (2) an exponential search method is adopted to calculate the rechecking sets for modified regions, reducing unnecessary bound comparisons between modified and static regions; (3) a bubble-sort-based matching algorithm is used to update the overlap statuses between modified regions. Experimental results demonstrate that the EDSIM algorithm achieves significantly better performance than the major existing dynamic matching algorithms under various experimental scenarios.