Proximity-Aware Synchronization within Federation Communities

Federation communities in distributed simulation are attracting increasing interest in current works. Distributed federation occurs especially when simulation space is partitioned into logically independent parts forming rather autonomous clusters. However, federates in a cluster may become logically related to other federates in other clusters, in time. The main idea of this work is to view a federation community as a set of federate clusters. In this case the intra-cluster synchronization is separated from the inter-cluster synchronization. Synchronization between clusters is necessary only when the different federate clusters become close to each other, depending on their relative proximity. When they are distant to each other they are assumed not to interact with each other, thus acting autonomously. Allowing such a temporal partitioning should reduce network traffic required for logical time management mechanism and also decrease the blocking time of individual federates