Stability of event synchronisation in distributed discrete event simulation

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the behaviour of message queues in distributed discrete event simulators. We view a logical process in a distributed simulation as comprising a message sequencer with associated message queues, followed by an event processor. We show that, with standard stochastic assumptions for message arrival and time-stamp processes, the message queues are unstable for conservative sequencing, and for conservative sequencing with maximum lookahead and hence for optimistic resequencing, and for any resequencing algorithm that does not employ interprocessor “flow control”. These results point towards certain fundamental limits on the performance of distributed simulation of open queueing networks.