Performance Issues for the Light-Weight RTI

The Light-Weight RTI (LWRTI) was developed at GMU as an extension of our work in communication architectures for distributed simulation (Dual-Mode Multicast) and transport protocols for the large multicast environment (Selective Reliable Transmission Protocol or SRTP). This paper reports on our efforts to understand performance issues surrounding the LWRTI. One set of issues, in the area of throughput, relates to tuning the LWRTI software and identifying structural questions in the HLA that may constrain its performance, which initially was somewhat disappointing. The other set of issues relates to efficiency of the Hop-Hierarchical Multicast Logging (HHML) used by SRTP to configure dynamic multicast logging such that reliable transport is provided efficiently in a complex network, for those object attributes which are most effectively dealt with by reliable multicast transmission. We report our findings in each of these areas, with conclusions regarding the potential effectiveness of SRTP and the LWRTI in a large, dynamically configured multicast network.