With the emergence of technical standards for networking defense simulations, a means to evaluate the applicability of the new DIS PDU's and the draft DIS networking requirements to joint services applications is needed. This paper describes a rapid prototyping testbed which was developed to network two simulating devices using a fiber distributed data interface (FDDI) local area network (LAN). A Distributed Interactive Simulation Interface Unit (DIU) was developed to interface each simulating device to the FDDI LAN. The intent of the DIU was to off-load the host processor and to minimize the changes to existing trainers as a result of networking. The DIU performed the dead reckoning and translation of the data from(to) the DIS PDU protocol to the host computer format. The DIU was developed using both Ada and C and the simulating devices were developed in Pascal.

The DIS PDU protocol was also used as the communication protocol between the simulating device and the DIU. Thus, this prototype implemented the DIS PDU protocol in three different languages. The "lesson learned" from this DIS implementation and suggestions to undeveloped areas, such as Simulation Management and Electronic Warfare, in the DIS standard are discussed.