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 resource model/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 model will analyze the transmission capacity of potential SATCOM systems based on the required traffic and other factors including site location, characteristics of terminals and transponders, rain rate statistics, etc. The tool will allow users to allocate SATCOM carriers and assess transponder bandwidth for specific SATCOM products. The efforts for Phase I entail the establishment of a network model for the warfighting scenario that will consider traffic from different classes of services and different message precedence levels. A SATCOM library to support a high fidelity assessment of SATCOM terminals/components will be built within OPNET. The proposed model will consist of three major parts: communications traffic and analysis modeling, SATCOM resource and link analysis modeling, and SATCOM performance assessment modeling. The Phase I effort will apply/consider the technical approaches and analysis methodologies employed in the development of the related SATCOM Network Planning Tool and conclude with a proof-of-concept to demonstrate the functionalities and capabilities of the proposed toolset.