Providing interoperable real-time data communication with TENA

The U.S. DoD testing and training ranges present enormous interoperability challenges for communicating their real-time data. To address these challenges, the U.S. DoD has developed the Test and Training Enabling Architecture (TENA). Chief among these interoperability challenges is the fact that the developers working to support the ranges are geographically distributed, may have never met each other, and do not report to a common authority. Nevertheless, the software systems created by these developers must somehow interoperate to exchange their data in real-time. TENA supports the rapid, reliable, distributed and collaborative development of applications for large-scale, high-performance, distributed, real-time and embedded systems. At the core of TENA, the TENA Middleware delicately weaves together a unique combination of model-driven, automatically-generated software with high-level, easy-to-understand programming abstractions and an API designed to detect programming errors at compile-time rather than run-time, where the cost of an error could be extremely high! TENA also provides re-usable standardized object models that further simplify the development of TENA applications. TENA provides a flexible and extensible Object Model Compiler (OMC) that can automatically generate arbitrary products, such as ex- ample programs, test programs, data loggers, and gateways to legacy systems (such as DIS, HLA, etc.).