A unified framework for conservative and optimistic distributed simulation

A great deal of research in the area of distributed discrete event simulation has focussed on evaluating the performance of variants of conservative and optimistic methods on different types of applications. Application characteristics like lookahead, communication patterns, etc. have been found to affect the suitability of a specific protocol to simulate a given model. For many systems, it may be the case that different subsystems possess contradictory characteristics such that whereas some subsystems may be simulated efficiently using a conservative protocol, others may be more amenable to optimistic methods. Furthermore, the suitability of a protocol for a given subsystem may change dynamically. We propose a parallel simulation protocol that allows different parts of a system to be simulated using different protocols, allowing these protocols to be switched dynamically. A proof of correctness is presented, along with some preliminary performance discussion.