Offloading Data Distribution Management to Network Processors in HLA-Based Distributed Simulations

The high-level architecture (HLA) standard developed by the Department of Defense in the United States is a key technology to perform distributed simulation. Inside the HLA framework, many different simulators (termed federates) may be interconnected to create a single more complex simulator (federation). Data distribution management (DDM) is an optional subset of services that controls which federates should receive notification of state modifications made by other federates. A simple DDM implementation will usually generate much more traffic than needed, whereas a complex one might introduce too much overhead. In this work, we describe an approach to DDM that delegates a portion of the DDM computation to a processor on the network card in order to provide more CPU time for other federate and Runtime Infrastructure (RTI) computations while still being able to exploit the benefits of a complex DDM implementation to reduce the amount of information exchange.