Un-identical federate replication structure for improving performance of HLA-based simulations

•Propose an un-identical replication structure for improving performance of HLA-based simulations.•Use a middleware approach to support federate replication transparently.•Develop message exchange and time management mechanisms to handle different behaviors of un-identical replicas.•Provide correctness proof of the un-identical replication structure.•Achieve significant performance enhancement with good scalability and marginal overhead.

The execution of an HLA-based simulation (federation) is usually time consuming, as it usually involves a number of compute-intensive simulation components (federates). To improve simulation performance, an un-identical federate replication structure is proposed in this article. For the same federate, multiple replicas are developed in software diversity manner by employing different synchronization approaches. The simulation performance is improved by always choosing the fastest replica to represent the federate in the federation. The replication structure is implemented in a transparent manner without increasing federation scale. Message exchange and time management mechanisms are developed to handle the different behaviors of those un-identical replicas. Correctness of the replication structure is proved in theory and verified by experiments. The experimental results have also shown that the un-identical federate replication structure achieves significant performance enhancement with good scalability and marginal overhead.