Comparison of Network Protocol and Architecture for Distributed Virtual Simulation Environment

In any distributed virttml simulation enviromnent, the underlying network architecture and its protocols play an important part in its performance. Tiffs paper describes tile different underlying protocols used in file support of the RTI implementation in the Federated Simulations Development Kit (FDK). The communication FM and MCAST modules were modified to support different protocols. Tile performance of two different protocols: TCP and a new Lightweight Reliable Multicast, called Pseudo Reliable Multicast Protocol (PRMP), running on top of two different network architectures Ethemet and Asyncltronous Transfer Mode (ATM) were compared. The latter protocol was developed specifically to support he distributed virtual simulation enviromnent. Furthermore, in the case of the ATM network architecture, the use of native ATM-API was also implemented and its performance compared with file other protocols. The benclunarks used to compare their performance are Latency and Time Advance Request Benchmark. The results how that PRMP outperforms the other protocol teclmiques when the number of subscribers are large and when file bandwidth is limited. But it has some additional latency overhead, due to additional processing required to provide tile reliability. needed by the sender and receivers. Comparing the network architecture, the benclunark performance of the above protocols operating on top of 100BaseT switch network performs much better than over ATM network, although the transmission speed is much higher in file case of the latter. 1