Scalable Network Technologies (SNT) plans to introduce software before year’s end that it says will enable the users of new wireless communications networks to train on a digital representation of that network as if they were using the real thing.

Los Angeles-based SNT labels Exata as a “real-time emulation” that evolved from its existing QualNet real-time simulation designed for use in software virtual networks and which will be marketed as a commercial off-the-shelf acquisition. “Exata will just make the transition where you can embed this real-time digital replica for a physical network” for diverse applications, SNT founder and CEO Ragive Bagrodia said.

Bagrodia said the focus is on net-centric systems, which become ever-more important to militaries around the world as war fighters rely on myriad ways to communicate — voice, video, data, etc. — but find they cannot rely on those systems to be 100 percent instantaneous or secure.

“Those different types of traffic that you deal with, they have much tighter requirements than e-mail has,” he said.

In training, “many of those systems were developed in an era when net-centricity was not that critical, where you really depended on stovepipe systems, when communication could be taken for granted because it was so over-provisioned” that you get away with assuming perfect communications, Bagrodia said.

“As we move toward a net-centric training mode, our tools that we had been assuming for perfect comms, I think will tend to fall seriously deficient,” he added. “SNT wants to allow the net-centric representations of our infrastructure to be embedded within the current generation of training tools, thus hopefully making them more relevant for the net-centric environment.”

Exata has been designed specifically for the training market, Bagrodia said, and SNT has been conducting tests on it with the U.S. Army for the massive Future Combat Systems program, though he said he was unable to provide specifics. The company’s goal “is to have a digital representation of the communications network that is basically indistinguishable from the physical network for the purpose of training.”

For example, Bagrodia said if a user wanted the Army’s next-generation Joint Tactical Radio System to interact with a legacy system such as Sincgars (the Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System), “I may even be able to have them interoperate in a way that the actual systems can’t do in the field,” and be available for training years before the actual new systems are fielded.

Early responses to Exata demonstrations have been good, he said. “Our focus is really on net-centric systems. Whether they be commercial or military really doesn’t matter to us from a pure technology perspective.”

If a customer wanted to see how a system would operate in a wireless network, “what we can do with Exata is embed this model of the wireless communication network directly underneath this application and let the user use it as he or she would,” Bagrodia said. “Except that now, instead of communicating over whatever communication network they’re using, they would get the experience of how that would be affected if they were running it over a wireless communication network.”

— Jack Weible