INTEGRATION OF MODELLING TOOLS FOR COMMUNICATION PROTOCOLS USING HLA

摘要

Distributing a large simulation among several computers is often regarded as an issue for the performance of the system and for its usability. This is even more complex when this simulation is made of heterogeneous models: using different Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) simulation frameworks such as OPNET, Matlab/Simulink and custom C/C++ models, possibly running on different operating systems (Windows, Solaris, Linux), and relying on different simulation advancement mechanisms (event-driven or time-driven). The paper presents a framework supporting the end user for automated model distribution, remote monitoring and control of distributed components of simulations. Also, a dedicated development process is specified guiding the model developers from building and through deploying their models into an integrated and optimized simulation. The Distributed Heterogeneous Simulation Environment (DHSE) was validated by and first used for telecommunication system end-to-end simulations, where each layer of the protocol stack needs a dedicated COTS tool, as some aspects are better suited to an event-driven type of simulation while other algorithms are easier to implement with a time-driven simulator. This work is carried out within the ESA contract 18660/04/NL/JA under the responsibility of EADS Astrium (F) and its partners Critical Software (P) and GTI6 (F). The selection of technologies used for DHSE is first presented. Then we elaborate on the architecture of DHSE, relying both on mature standards (HLA for interoperability, MPI for parallelization) and project-specific solutions with a focus on the integration with heterogeneous COTS. Finally, we describe the methodology devised towards both models developers and simulator end users.