Design approach to implement implicit traffic in a simulation environment

As the United States' Army attempts to spiral future force technologies into the current force, realistic representations of network-centric warfare become a priority for modeling and simulation (M&S). Specifically, future communications systems will provide different performance and capabilities than current systems, and these new capabilities need to be represented by the Army's M&S. In order to enable realistic analysis, the new communications systems models will need to be loaded by realistic representations of traffic flows to ensure the accuracy of the command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance (C4ISR) analysis results. This paper will present a design approach and a series of algorithms to implement implicit traffic in the Future Combat Systems (FCS) Simulation Environment (FSE). The paper will focus on a phased approach for the generation of implicit traffic that will realistically load the modeled communications networks as the level of explicit traffic within the simulation environment increases from a small percentage to a large percentage of overall traffic.