Modeling and Simulation for Higher Fidelity of Commercial SATCOM Capability as a Design Aid to the Planning and Decision Making Process.

This proposal is to develop a SATCOM toolset to provide the military SATCOM community the ability to examine communications systems’ performance with respect to achieving maximum data rates for a given set of SATCOM terminals. The toolset will accurately model the end-to-end performance characteristics of SATCOM systems including the Navy’s Commercial Broadband Satellite Program. The tool will analyze the amount of generated traffic and the transmission capacity of potential SATCOM systems based on the scenarios given by the user. The tool will allow the users to allocate SATCOM carriers and assess transponder bandwidth for the SATCOM design and evaluation for the acquisition process. To evaluate the network performances, the toolset provides a high-fidelity network simulation model, which can be integrated with the Navy’s existing converged IP network model. The proposed toolset will consist of four major parts: Communications traffic and analysis modeling, SATCOM resource and link analysis modeling, SATCOM performance assessment modeling, and OPNET simulation model. The Phase II effort will provide the prototype model software to be used for the SATCOM design and the bandwidth performance evaluation, and the OPNET simulation model to be used to evaluate the SATCOM network performances.