Brage– a voice communication tool for DIS and HLA

Voice communication is an important part of military operations. When training for a military operation in a simulator, it is important to also represent voice communication as part of the simulation. This makes the simulation as realistic as possible. Brage is an application for sending and receiving voice data over the Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) and High Level Architecture (HLA) protocols. It was originally developed as a test tool to verify that commercial voice applications followed the standards. It supports most of the audio encoding algorithms that are specified in the DIS standard, and most DIS/HLA data fields can be set to values chosen by the user. Brage has also been used as a voice communication tool in its own right, as an alternative to more expensive and proprietary commercial software. It has therefore been extended with more practical functionality, such as push-to-talk, voice activation, the ability to subscribe to several audio channels, and the ability to configure which stereo channels an audio channel should be played back on. This report contains a user guide for Brage, as well as a technical description of how sound data is sent over DIS and a description of Brage’s software architecture.