Transparent state management for optimistic synchronization in the high level architecture

In this paper we present the design and implementation of a software architecture, namely Magic State Manager (MASM), to be employed within a run-time infrastructure (RTI) in support of HLA federations. MASM allows performing checkpointing/recovery of the state of a federate in a way completely transparent to the federate itself, thus providing the possibility of demanding to the RTI any task related to state management in optimistic synchronization. Differently from existing proposals, through our approach the federate programmer is neither required to supply modules for state management within the federate code, nor to explicitly interface the federate code with existing, third party checkpointing/recovery libraries. Hence, the federate programmer is completely relieved from the burden of facing state management issues. Some experimental results demonstrating minimal run-time overhead introduced by MASM are also reported for two case studies, namely an interconnection network simulation and a personal communication system simulation.