Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) is an IEEE standard for conducting real-time platform-level wargaming across multiple host computers and is used worldwide, especially by military organizations but also by other agencies such as those involved in space exploration and medicine.
The standard itself is very closely patterned after the original SIMNET distributed interactive simulation protocol, developed by Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) for Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) in the early through late 1980s.
BBN introduced the concept of dead reckoning to efficiently transmit the state of battle field entities.
Funding and research interest for DIS standards development decreased following the proposal and promulgation of its successor, the High Level Architecture (simulation) (HLA) in 1996.
This was retired in favour of HLA in 1998 and officially cancelled in 2010 by the NATO Standardization Agency (NSA).