A division of the U.S. military often trains soldiers in remote locations such as the Middle East using “distance learning.” Distance learning has become a popular way to deliver online courses to military personnel, providing video training, Flash- or Java-based self-paced learning modules, and online certifications. Distance learning often leverages multimedia content, which requires expanded network capacity. For troops deployed overseas, numerous challenges were impeding the performance and usability of the training applications. The military needed a solution that would solve these problems to train soldiers more quickly and efficiently. For remote field training, network delivery was a particular challenge for military applications. Satellite networks are typically used in areas where traditional terrestrial networks cannot reach. Soldiers then use laptops to download training content, programs, or other materials via satellite connection. Satellite Internet connections, however, present several difficulties. As training modules access multimedia files that are delivered via the web, propagation delays cause high latency as message requests are sent at the speed of light to distant satellite stations and then back to the U.S. When viewing web pages, for example, soldiers were experiencing significant delays. High rates of latency were also causing training applications to time out or disconnect, which was frustrating to soldiers and severely impacting training productivity. Network degradation due to loss was an additional concern. Both high latency and loss were severely impacting the quality and delivery speed of the training content.
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