Simulation is a low cost and safe alternative to solve complex problems in various areas. To promote reuse and interoperability of simulation applications and link geographically dispersed simulation components, distributed simulation was introduced. The High Level Architecture (HLA) is the IEEE standard for distributed simulation. To optimize communication efficiency between simulation components, HLA defines a Data Distribution Management (DDM) service group for filtering out unnecessary data exchange. It relies on the computation of overlap between update and subscription regions, which is called matching. In this paper, we propose an efficient sort-based DDM matching algorithm for HLA applications with a large spatial environment. A theoretical analysis of our algorithm concludes that it should have good storage and computational scalability. The experimental results have verified the theoretical conclusions by showing that our algorithm has much less storage requirement than the original sort-based matching algorithm and generally has the best computational performance when compared with region-based and the original sort-based matching algorithms.