Synthetic Theater of War-Europe (STOW-E) Technical Analysis

The Synthetic Theater of War-Europe STOW-E distributed simulation demonstration was conducted 47 November 1994. This exercise linked 16 sites around the world in a single virtual battlespace. Live, virtual, and constructive forces representing all four DoD services participated in a joint operation involving land, sea, and air engagement. One of the critical technologies demonstrated in the STOW-E was Scaleability. The goal of the Scaleability effort was to support the evolution of Distributed Interactive Simulation DIS technology by pushing back the limitations on the number of entities that could participate in an exercise. The Scaleability challenge for STOW-E was to reduce the traffic generated by the participating simulations to the 1.1 megabit-per-second Mbps capacity of the tail circuits of the Defense Simulation Internet DSI. The Scaleability solution was to reduce the DIS traffic load offered to the DSI wide area network WAN by using seven bandwidth-demand reduction techniques BRTs. The algorithms were as follows 1 Protocol Data Unit PDU Culling 2 Broadcast Grid Filtering 3 Quiescent Entity Determination QED 4 Protocol Independence Compression Algorithm PICA 5 Bundling 6 Overload Management 7 LAN Filtering. These algorithms were housed in Application Gateways AG that operated in series between the DSI WAN and the simulation LAN ETAATI, 1994.