Uma comparação de tecnologias para a comunicação entre simuladores distribuídos em ambiente Unity

Abstract

When simulators need to exchange data between different computers, belonging to the same simulator or to different simulators, some technology is used that allows the connection between the distributed instances of the simulation. These technologies can vary from APIs for the simple exchange of messages to interoperability standards that have several functionalities with defined approaches. Focusing on simulations developed on the Unity Engine, this work compares four interoperability technologies: Unity Networking (UNET), Unity’s internal network support, Tasharem Networking and Serialization Tools (TNET 3), a Unity asset to support network programming at Unity, High Level Architecture (HLA), one of the main simulator interoperability standards, and Data Distribution Service (DDS), one of major interoperability standards for real-time applications. The work aims to highlight the pros and cons of the technologies taking into account the design of a distributed simulator developed in Unity. The work results highlight that the adoption of a technology belonging to the Unity environment, such as TNET3, is the most adequate in the context of the studied simulator.