As any gamer will tell you, it is compelling to connect simulations and play with other actual human participants, whether in the next room or on the next continent. The seminal development of simulation networking in the 1980’s connected Army tank training simulators, enabling them to interact over local and wide area networks.
The desire to expand this to all military training and engineering simulations resulted in a large government, industry, and acedemic effort to standardize the network protocol for simulation interoperability. Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) was the result, using the IEEE standards process to create technically sound and widely accepted protocol to link military training and engineering simulations. IEEE 1278TM-1995 and additions in 1998 were the first full DIS standards that contained the protocol and rules for real-time simulation interoperability of military land, sea, and air platforms, weapon interactions, radar, radio, IFF, laser designators, underwater acoustics, logistics, simulation management functions, and more.
The success of DIS expanded into the Simulation Interoperability Standards Organization (SISO) in 1996. SISO took over the development of the DIS standard and launched a wider range of simulation standards. Work in the 2000’s developed the next round of improvements of DIS, resulting in IEEE 1278.1TM-2012. Continued development within SISO is working toward the next version, referred to as Version 8, expected to be completed in the mid-2020’s.
This tutorial explains how DIS achieves real-time high-fidelity interoperability over best-effort networks. The basic concept and some of the technical details will be introduced to give students a foundation for starting and expanding the implementation and use DIS in their simulations. The standards process, history, and future directions of DIS are also presented.