The Model Development Guide is to provide modeling guidelines and standards for creating communications device models that will be interoperable with the NETWARS System and model suite (version 2002-1 or later).

The Model Development Guide provides the standards for creating NETWARS Standard communication device models and provides the instructions for modifying existing OPNET Standard (COTS) models (OPNET Modeler version 8.1 or later) for integration into the existing NETWARS software. These communications device models will be used primarily for the analysis of Joint Task Force scenarios.

The level of detail in this Guide is based on the experienced model developer’s needs and will provide the necessary information to develop models that will perform the functionality required by NETWARS. The functionalities include but are not limited to:

• Performing necessary initialization procedures
• Generating proper statistics
• Handling the NETWARS concept of traffic (IERS)

Models built according to the guidelines outlined in this Guide will be interoperable with not only other models developed using these standards, but also with the majority of the OPNET Standard (COTS) device models. In this way, future model development may take advantage of many years of commercial development and model testing by leveraging the OPNET Standard (COTS) model library. This library includes intrinsic capabilities for common communication modeling issues such as traffic generation, dynamic routing and connection establishment. The library also contains a wealth of standard protocol models such as Ethernet, ATM, Frame Relay, FDDI, Token Ring, DSL, TCP/IP, RIP, OSPF, EIGRP, IGRP, BGP, FTP and HTTP.

Two areas of standards can be thought of as capability guidelines and interoperability requirements. It is possible to build other types of NETWARS device models that will follow the capability guidelines and yet not the int21-Sep-2004an be used in the NETWARS System to build scenarios and perform studies, but they would not be fully interoperable with the NETWARS or OPNET Standard (COTS) model libraries. Studies performed with such models would likely only include models developed by one developer. At this time, this segregated view of the standards is not addressed here, but it will be addressed in future versions of this document. Such a segregated view would be useful to military model developers who desire to take advantage of the NETWARS System’s scenario-building environment, but have no interest in leveraging the NETWARS Standard or OPNET Standard (COTS) model libraries.