Traffic characterization of manned-simulators and computer generated forces in DIS exercises

Distributed interactive simulation (DIS) is an ambitious attempt to seamlessly integrate heterogeneous simulators of various fidelity levels via a communications network to allow them to interact in the same synthetic environment, by means of standardized messages, known as DIS Protocol Data Units (PDUs). DIS traffic analysis has various purposes, one of which is capacity planning. This can be done effectively by understanding the traffic patterns of entities under specific maneuvers and interaction. In this paper, we characterize the traffic from DIS entities generated from computer generated forces (CGF) and manned simulators, in two cases. We characterize this by the issue rate of entity state PDUs, which comprises over 90% of DIS traffic. Our analysis shows that entities from CGF have a uniform traffic pattern and can therefore be used to populate a DIS environment effectively, while being able to plan the bandwidth required to sustain these entities.<>