Experiences integrating NETWARS with the naval simulation system using the high level architecture

The importance of network centric warfare continues to grow in today's modern military. Network centric warfare enables the military to access information across a secure worldwide network, anywhere, anytime, and conduct operations using this information. Determining which systems should make up this network and how to apportion resources are difficult questions to answer. These issues may have significant impacts on the outcome of engagements and on the success or failure of operations. It has been identified by this community that a modeling and simulation environment is needed to analyze how new and enhanced technologies affect operations. Modeling and simulation provide a means to quickly and relatively cheaply evaluate new technologies and to determine how best to utilize new and existing technologies. Currently NETWARS is the C4ISR network-modeling tool of choice. NETWARS was built to analyze network performance by providing a common tool and standard models to support the decision maker's ability to analyze impact of new technologies on network performance. The shortcoming of NETWARS is its inability to output metrics associated with operational effectiveness. Similarly, the Naval Simulation System (NSS) is a multi-warfare analysis tool developed to analyze operational metrics but provides coarse and sometimes incorrect assumptions of the underlying C4ISR network. Therefore by optimally combining the capabilities of the two respective tools, NETWARS and NSS, the modeling and simulation environment quality and depth of analysis would be greatly enhanced. This paper describes an effort to integrate NSS and NETWARS using Georgia Tech's DRTI (DRTI implements a substantial subset of HLA services) and the technical challenges encountered. A major portion of this work is middleware software called the DRTI-NETWARS plug-in that provides a suite of services needed to manage simulation time, the mapping of NSS objects to NETWARS objects, and facilitating communication between objects. This paper also explores the performance issues and discuss lessons learned.