Talk:SIMPLE (military communications protocol)

A few years back I lead a team implementing the SIMPLE protocol as a stand-alone node / extension to existing C4I system. This was targetted at live operational systems, as opposed to the original simulation intended. The goal was to allowed disparate bodies within a national defence environment to exchange information - where not all were Link 16 enabled, and naturally each body wanted to retain control of its information, and didn't really trust the others...

This article doesn't mention addressing, which supports specific nodes, groups, and broadcast to all - these address forms are independent of the transport, which may have similar concepts (Serial and TCP point-to-point, UCP multicast and broadcast). Any SIMPLE addressing needs to go over any physical transport layer (although that may be open to interpretation). This opens lots of opportunities for fun discussions with the prime customer!

One aspect that we where contracted not to support was the use of 'sequence numbers' in messages (which is part of the spec). We presumed that other players in the infrastructure didn't produce them reliably. However this basically meant that it wasn't safe to enable routing in the SIMPLE node implementation - as there was no way to then prevent "ringing" if there were any loops in the topology. Sawatts (talk) 11:04, 16 October 2017 (UTC)