{{more footnotes, date=June 2019
The Defense Simulation Internet (DSI) was a specialized, wide-area network created to support
Distributed Interactive Simulation
Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) is an IEEE standard for conducting real-time platform-level wargaming across multiple host computers and is used worldwide, especially by military organizations but also by other agencies such as those inv ...
and
videoconferences
Videotelephony (also known as videoconferencing or video calling) is the use of audio signal, audio and video for simultaneous two-way communication. Today, videotelephony is widespread. There are many terms to refer to videotelephony. ''Vide ...
. It was sponsored by
DARPA
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Adva ...
, and built and operated by
BBN Technologies
Raytheon BBN (originally Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Inc.) is an American research and development company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In 1966, the Franklin Institute awarded the firm the Frank P. Brown Medal, in 1999 BBN received the ...
from about 1991-1995, after which time it was operated by the
Defense Information Systems Agency
The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), known as the Defense Communications Agency (DCA) until 1991, is a United States Department of Defense (DoD) combat support agency. It is composed of military, federal civilians, and contractors. D ...
(DISA).
The DSI evolved from DARPA's earlier
Terrestrial Wideband Network {{more footnotes, date=June 2019
The Terrestrial Wideband Network was a DARPA-sponsored experimental network designed to support research in high-speed networking protocols and distributed multimedia applications. It was built and operated by BBN ...
, which could provide the realtime
multicast
In computer networking, multicast is a type of group communication where data transmission is addressed to a group of destination computers simultaneously. Multicast can be one-to-many or many-to-many distribution. Multicast differs from ph ...
with bandwidth guarantees that are essential to distributed interactive simulations via the
Internet Stream Protocol
The Internet Stream Protocol (ST) is a family of experimental protocols first defined in Internet Experiment Note IEN-119 in 1979, and later substantially revised in RFC 1190 (ST-II) and RFC 1819 (ST2+).
The protocol uses the version number 5 in ...
(ST-II). A
Defense Science Board
The Defense Science Board (DSB) is a committee of civilian experts appointed to advise the U.S. Department of Defense on scientific and technical matters. It was established in 1956 on the second Hoover Commission's recommendation.
Charter
The B ...
study in 1993 highlighted the importance of these capabilities in simulations, and by late 1994, the DSI connected about 100
local area network
A local area network (LAN) is a computer network that interconnects computers within a limited area such as a residence, campus, or building, and has its network equipment and interconnects locally managed. LANs facilitate the distribution of da ...
s at sites around the world. Many links operated at multiple T1 circuits, for an aggregate bandwidth of about 6 megabits/second. In 1994, DSI program management transitioned to a joint program office of DARPA and DISA, and after the network became fully operational in February 1995, DARPA handed off all management responsibility to DISA.
Phase I of the DSI was implemented by BBN T/20 routers running the
Internet Stream Protocol
The Internet Stream Protocol (ST) is a family of experimental protocols first defined in Internet Experiment Note IEN-119 in 1979, and later substantially revised in RFC 1190 (ST-II) and RFC 1819 (ST2+).
The protocol uses the version number 5 in ...
. Phase II, completed in October 1997, was a reimplementation using Cisco 7500 routers running the Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP) over ATM permanent virtual circuits. The Phase II topology was a mesh of 7 backbone nodes, with 46 tail circuits running to the other DSI sites as of April 1998. (See D. Sahu for a Phase II network map and extensive details.)
Defense Science Board
The Defense Science Board (DSB) is a committee of civilian experts appointed to advise the U.S. Department of Defense on scientific and technical matters. It was established in 1956 on the second Hoover Commission's recommendation.
Charter
The B ...
Task Force on Simulation, Readiness and Prototyping, 1993.
* "High-quality multimedia conferencing through a long-haul packet network", Chip Elliott, ''Proceedings of the first ACM international conference on Multimedia'', August 2-6, 1993, pages 91-98.
* "Emerging technologies - national/Defense Information Infrastructure and the Defense Information Systems Network", J.M. Pullen, D. Cohen, and D. Wood, ''Proceedings of MILCOM '93'', October 11-14, 1993.
* "Networking for Distributed Virtual Simulation", Mark Pullen, ''Computer Networks and ISDN Systems Journal'', vol. 27, no. 3, Elsevier North-Holland, pages 387-394, December 1994.
* "Networking Technology and DIS", Mark Pullen and D. Wood, ''Proceedings of the IEEE'', vol. 83, no. 8, pages 1156-1167, August 1995.
* ''Distributed Interactive Simulation of Combat'',
Office of Technology Assessment
The Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) was an office of the United States Congress that operated from 1974 to 1995. OTA's purpose was to provide congressional members and committees with objective and authoritative analysis of the complex scien ...