High fidelity simulation of wireless communication networks

An emerging problem in mission planning is consideration of the communication requirements of the mission participants. Determining the appropriate resources to satisfy the communication needs of a battle group requires detailed simulation that incorporates terrain effects, mobility, realistic network traffic models, device characteristic, etc. Providing such a detailed simulation environment that also provides the performance necessary to complete a planning study in a time-critical environment is a complex problem beyond the capabilities of existing solutions. The NETS project set out with the goal of providing a high fidelity library of network components that could be simulated n parallel on a variety of parallel architectures. It was proposed as a parallel effort that can be added to the NETWARS program as additional capability for high fidelity and fast simulations. The NETS library is based on the COTS QualNet Simulator, and the public domain RTI software developed at Georgia Tech, and achieves significant performance gains on the HPC resources.