An Accurate, Scalable Communication Effects Server for the FCS System of Systems Simulation Environment

The future combat systems (FCS) program is developing the FCS system of systems simulation environment (FSE) to provide the "real world wraparound" to the FCS system of systems simulation framework (S2F). A primary component of the FCS is the communication effects server (CES) whose objective is to develop a flexible, scalable, and high-performance, packet-level, discrete-event simulator that will accurately portray the behavior of the FCS communications architecture to eventually support the live, constructive, and virtual simulations envisaged in the FSE. In particular, the CES is required to compute, in real-time, accurate end-end latency for every communication message sent over a wireless network in a FSE experiment. This paper provides an overview of the CES that has been developed using the QualNet network simulator. It presents results on the performance of the CES for the simulation of large on-the-move communication networks in real-time