Simulation-based SW/HW architectural design configurations for distributed mission training systems

Distributed Mission Training (DMT) is a concept composed of promising technologies that support training in a variety of domains such as defense and medicine. To develop and deploy such systems, it is important to account concurrently for hardware and software requirements, given high demands for network bandwidth, computing resources, and complexity of software applications. In this paper, we present the application of a distributed co-design methodology (Discrete Event System Specification/Distributed Object Computing) as applied to the Mission Training and Rehearsal System (MTRS), a DMT system. For an example, we show that the developed simulation models allow prediction of the network capacity below which messages cannot be sent and therefore incorrect behavior results. The key issues presented are (1) characterization of the DMT style architectures in DEVS/DOC, (2) prediction of DMT-like basic scalability traits via simulation, and (3) discussion on some open problems underlying the applicability of distributed co-design for systems containing "off-the-shelf" components.