Exploiting reality with multicast groups

This article describes our investigation into developing large distributed simulations. The architecture we describe logically partitions virtual environments by associating spatial, temporal, and functional classes with network multicast groups. We exploit the actual characteristics of the real-world large scale environments being simulated by focusing or restricting an entity's processing and network resources to its area of interest via a local area-of-interest manager. For example, a simulated infantryman in a virtual environment doesn't need to know the condition of a simulated truck 20 virtual kilometres away