ITC/USA 2008 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Fourth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 27-30, 2008 / Town and Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, California / ARINC 664 presents the designers of data acquisition systems challenges not previously seen on other aircraft avionic buses. Among the biggest challenges are providing the test instrumentation system with the capacity to process two redundant Ethernet segments that may be carrying packet traffic at near wire-line speed. To achieve this level of performance, the hardware and software must not only perform mundane operations, like time stamping and simple virtual link MAC filtering, but also need to implement core ARINC 664 functions like redundancy management and integrity checking. Furthermore, other TCP/IP operations, such as IP header checksum, must also be offloaded to the hardware in order to maintain real-time operation. This paper describes the implementation path followed by TTC during its development of an ARINC 664 network monitor used in a large commercial aircraft flight test program.

ITC/USA 2007 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Third Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 22-25, 2007 / Riviera Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / The deployment of networks has become ubiquitous in the avionics world, as they have opened the door to a rich suite of common and open hardware and software tools that provide greater functionality and interoperability. Unfortunately, a number of networked avionic and other related applications can be affected by vendor or application specific proprietary implementations. These “closed” implementations may reduce or eliminate the benefits of a standardized network, requiring the customization of the data acquisition system to allow it to properly operate with the other devices. This paper presents the approach that was recently employed for the development of a network interface module that can be quickly reconfigured to address the changing requirements of network applications, including monitoring of industry standard and proprietary networks, or providing the command and data interface to the data acquisition system itself. This reconfigurability of the module is shown in a review of four different specific applications.