Use of advanced HF physical, link, and network simulators in the standards development process

Modeling and simulation are important components of present day HF radio communications standards development process. This paper summarizes work at the Institute for Telecommunication Sciences (ITS) under the direction and funding of the National Communications System (NCS) in the development of simulation tools useful in the HF standards development process in the United States. The simulation tools are introduced from the perspective of (1) the phase of the standards development process to which the tools may be applied and (2) the communication system layer to which they may be applicable. Particular emphasis in this paper is placed on the development of a new real-time HF channel simulator, the development of a compact disk-based automatic link establishment (ALE) tone simulator, and the development of a general purpose digital signal processor-based system for simulating HF network protocols