| Summary: | Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited. === Any military operation, no matter how large or small requires some level of planning. Planning has become more complicated, requiring interactions across geographical, functional, and organizational boundaries in a more compressed command and control decision cycle. For ships at sea, planning with other units, at sea or on shore, is constrained by the availability of communications bandwidth and limitations of the tools used for real-time interactions. Emerging tools such as audio and video conferencing and shared whiteboard, enable real-time collaboration among dispersed forces. However, these tools are bandwidth "greedy," requiring more than is currently available on many ships. In an effort to determine what amount of bandwidth a ship needs, this thesis used simulation and modeling to experiment with combinations of bandwidth, collaboration tools, number of planners, and network delivery methods. In general, a bandwidth of 128 kbps enables two ships to conduct a video and audio session. Using multicast network delivery, 256 kbps enables a ship to collaborate with five other sites, and at 384 kbps, a ship can conduct a whiteboard with video and audio with up to eight other sites
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