Synthetic Theater of War (STOW) Engineering Demonstration-1A (ED-1A) Analysis Report.

The primary goal of the Real Time Information Transfer and Networking RITN effort is to evaluate and develop technologies to integrate into a scaleable network solution for the distribution simulation ACTD STOW 97. Prior to ED-1A, the greatest success for network solutions within the STOW program occurred with the demonstration of the Synthetic Theater of War-Europe STOW-E in November 1994, in which 1800 simulation entries were supported on a distributed network with a 1.1 Mbps throughput limitation. The entity count goal to demonstrate the success of RITN in Engineering Demonstration 1A ED-1A was 5000 entities. Through the course of the demonstration, RITN achieved all of its major objectives. This report discusses several conclusions. Multicasting reduced the volume of traffic received by individual sites by 35 to 60 over that which would have been received with a broadcast delivery scheme. The new bi-level multicast and consistency protocols were very robust and show promise for extensibility into future applications. The High Performance Application Gateways HPAG introduced minimal transmission delays while providing a router interface between the LAN and WAN not available in the commercial world. The agent architecture employed was effective and contributed minimal additional traffic to the network. The RITN architecture allows for the participation of legacy simulations in the large-scale exercises of the future. An exercise of the magnitude envisioned for STOW 97 can be supported by existing backbone technology. LAN technologies must be upgraded to support local data loads to host processors. The Simple Network Management Protocol SNMP, with minor adjustments to the ED-1A implementation, will be an effective and indispensable tool for exercise management and rapid data collection in future exercises.