DVCon Europe 2025 is coming up in mid-October. It is arguably the best conference for virtual platform technology, gathering many of the most active academics and practitioners. This year, we have a paper in the conference about federated simulation with VLAB.
VLAB uses the Vector SIL Kit Open-Source network simulation library to connect VLAB virtual development machines (VDMs) into simulated networks for common protocols like Ethernet and CAN. Each VDM runs in its own process with network traffic and time synchronization to the other processes provided by SIL Kit. With Python, it is easy to script a setup networking two or more machines.
The focus of our paper is measuring how the simulator-to-simulator synchronization and simulator time quantum settings affect the simulation performance and the software-visible system behavior. We also assess the effect of host network latency on the federated simulation (hint: it is not pretty).
This paper is only about networking and its performance. There are many other ways to connect VLAB VDMs into co-simulation environments and to attach debuggers and other software tools to the simulator.
The paper will be presented in session 6C, “Advances in Virtual Platform Integration”, in the room Forum 6, at 14.15 on Wednesday October 15. Lots of graphs are promised!
