Optimized Federate Migration for Large-Scale HLA-Based Simulations

Federate migration is a fundamental mechanism for large-scale distributed simulations. It provides the means for simulation load-balancing and thus improves the simulation´s overall performance. Given its importance for simulations, several federate migration approaches have been proposed in the literature. Some approaches freeze the entire simulation, others use third-party mechanisms to transport data, and others make use of unnecessary communication and computing. Thus, in order to minimize the time spent on federate migration, we introduce a simulation agent that manages the migration steps, as well as the migrating federate´s communication with the other simulation entities. The use of the agent simplifies the message management transparently and avoids redundant usage of network and computing resources. We demonstrate through simulation experiments that our approach decreases federate migration latency, improving the performance of HLA simulations that run over large-scale environments.