Abstract:

Simulation engine is critical to the operation of simulation platform. Aiming at the problems of low parallelism， insufficient computing resources and difficulty in expanding of the existing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle （UAV） simulation platforms， a UAV Swarm Containerized Parallel Simulation Engine （USCPSE） with distributed framework and container mechanism was designed and implemented. In the proposed simulation engine， containers were used as the running carriers of UAV virtual entities， and the containers were deployed to multiple parallel simulation nodes to realize large-scale UAV swarm simulation. Besides， based on container live migration technology， a container scheduling strategy integrating communication and computing load was proposed， which was able to migrate containers dynamically according to communication relationships between swarms and computational load changes of simulation nodes， thereby improving comprehensive performance of large-scale UAV swarm simulation. Experimental results show that under clusters with 100， 150 and 200 nodes， compared with Message Passing Interface （MPI）-based parallel simulation architecture， USCPSE increases the speed-up ratio by 22.4%， 59.8% and 101.9%， respectively， and decreases the communication traffic by 51.8% on average.

Key words: Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarm, parallelized simulation framework, container live migration, container scheduling strategy

摘要：

仿真引擎是仿真平台运行的关键。针对现有无人机（UAV）仿真平台并行度较低、计算资源不足且难以扩展的问题，采用分布式的仿真框架及容器机制，设计并实现UAV集群容器化并行仿真引擎（USCPSE）。所提仿真引擎使用容器作为UAV虚拟实体的运行载体，并将容器部署至并行的多个仿真节点，以实现规模化UAV集群仿真。此外，基于容器热迁移技术，提出通信和计算负载融合的容器调度策略。该策略可以根据集群间的通信关系以及仿真节点计算负载的变化，动态迁移容器，从而有效提升规模化UAV集群仿真的综合性能。实验结果表明，在100、150和200节点的集群规模下，USCPSE与基于MPI的并行仿真架构相比，仿真加速比分别提升了22.4%、59.8%和101.9%，同时通信量平均降低了51.8%。

关键词: 无人机集群, 并行化仿真框架, 容器热迁移, 容器调度策略