Synchronised range queries in distributed simulations of multiagent systems

Range queries are an increasingly important associative form of data access encountered in different computational environments including peer-to-peer systems, wireless communications, database systems, distributed virtual environments, and, more recently, distributed simulations. In this article, we present and evaluate a system for performing logical-time synchronised Range-Queries over data in the context of distributed simulations of multiagent systems. This article presents algorithms performing instantaneous queries within an optimistic synchronisation framework and in the presence of dynamic migration of the simulation state. A quantitative evaluation of the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms under different conditions and for different benchmarks, including Boids, is also presented. © 2013 ACM.