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Guest Editorial: Advanced and Distributed Simulation

This special issue on Advanced and Distributed Simulation features four articles extended from papers previously published at the 22nd ACM/IEEE/SCS Workshop on Principles of Advanced and Distributed Simulation (PADS 2008). The original papers are all candidates for the Best Paper Award at the conference. The paper by Nicol and Schear actually won the Best Paper Award. As a common practice, all articles in this issue have been extended significantly from the original papers and have undergone rigorous peer reviews and necessary revisions. These four articles cover a variety of advanced simulation and modeling techniques and applications, with topics ranging from distributed simulation time management, wireless simulation, to analytical models, and peer-to-peer gaming applications. This diversity reflects the growing importance of simulation and modeling in facilitating understanding of the increasingly complex systems that we have to deal with nowadays. The article by Pan, Turner, Cai, and Li addresses a well-known performance issue in conservatively synchronized parallel simulation—in this case, in the time management of distributed simulations using the High-Level Architecture (HLA). The proposed hybrid approach combines the traditional synchronous methods, which may suffer from performance problems caused by bottlenecks formed by HLA federates with slow time advancement, and the asynchronous methods, which may run into the "time creep" problem in the presence of small lookahead. The proposed hybrid approach promises better perfor-