Reducing Latencies for Distributed Environments

"While simulation can be used as a real-time battlefield aid in support of network centric interoperability, existing simulation frameworks do not provide the necessary performance. Problems exist in the areas of data latency, processing efficiency, andbandwidth utilization. One way of improving simulation performance in the network centric paradigm is to improve communications over a wide area network. This effort proposes to develop a specialized Wide Area Network Communications Library andDistributed Server based on destination-based multicast using the TCP/IP protocol. This effort proposes to implement the distributed server using smart routing tables in software at each branch of the distributed router. The resulting implementation willprovide not only a destination-based multicast implementation for Wide Area Networking, but will also server as a starting point for an Adaptive Routing-based implementation. This technology will be integrated in both the SPEEDES Simulation Framework andRAM Laboratories' WarpIVTM simulation engine. This SBIR is viewed as having excellent commercial potential. Naturally, this SBIR and the support for simulation across wide area networks will have far reaching support for the DOD in the area of networkcentric warfare. However, .the distributed server technology and wide area network libraries will provide for better performance and across all collaborative environments. This technology will augment