Distributed interactive simulation: it's past, present, and future

In the mid 1980's the U.S. Department of Defense, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) launched the SIMNET project, which gave birth to a technology era and networking protocol presently known as Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS). The DIS Protocol is a widely used IEEE Standard. At first it was primarily used by the military for mission rehearsal, training, and weapon evaluations. Today, other areas, such as transportation, medical care, entertainment, Internet commerce, and manufacturing, are using DIS complaint siniulations to meet their needs. This paper will provide a detailed overview of DIS. It will focus on the fundamental concepts, such as peer to peer connectivity, protocol data units, and dead reckoning. It will also cover some advanced topics, such as smoothing for visualization and shared virtual environments. Finally, this paper will discuss the future of DIS. In particular, MaK will discuss the next generation DIS, otherwise known as the High Level Architecture (HLA), new protocols, and bandwidth reduction techniques.