A two-stage load balancing method for HLA simulation system on cloud simulation platform

Cloud simulation makes contribution to simulation system by providing on-demand, everywhere simulation services. Load Balancing is a fatal issue for Cloud simulation for the reason that an overloaded node may cause slowdown of the whole system. To acquire high performance of Cloud simulation, this paper proposes a two-stage load balancing method. The first stage aims to virtual machine (VM) load balancing by using a heuristic algorithm to allocate Federates to VMs before the simulation start. In the second stage, the VMs are dynamically migrated between physical machines (PMs) to keep the load balancing of PMs during the simulation. Experiments show that the two-stage load balancing method can significantly improve the efficiency of the HLA system on Cloud simulation platform (CSP).