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 / In today’s world, computer networking has become common place both in industry as well as home, however all networks are not the same! The Telemetry world, like with many industries, has critical design considerations that need to be evaluated when you begin a new system or just adding on to a current infrastructure. This paper is intended to outline needed considerations when planning or implementing a network design in Telemetry Systems. These applications can range from sensor data transport through High Definition/High Speed Video applications.

ITC/USA 2005 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-First Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 24-27, 2005 / Riviera Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / The adaptation of ubiquitous Ethernet technology to airborne FTI systems is a relatively recent development, offering multiple advantages to FTI applications, including a high data throughput and ability to integrate COTS equipment with ease. For large-scale FTI applications – such as on the Airbus A380 - the use of traditional PCM based data acquisition systems results in enormously complex system architectures, with difficulties in system design, implementation, commissioning, test and maintenance. However, on the A380, the use of the Ethernet-based, IENA protocol alleviated these problems, in addition to offering several additional advantages. This paper explores the theoretical and practical implications of using Ethernet-based data acquisition in an FTI application, with direct comparison to an equivalent PCM based system.

ITC/USA 2005 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-First Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 24-27, 2005 / Riviera Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / The telemetry industry anticipates the tremendous potential value of adding full networking capability to telemetry systems. However, much of this potential can be realized while working with legacy equipment. By adding modules that interface transparently to existing equipment, continuous telemetry data can be encapsulated in discrete packets for over the air transmission. Packet fields can include header, sequence number and bytes for error detection and correction. The RF packet is transmitted without gaps through a standard serial interface and rate adjusted for the packet overhead – effectively making packetization transparent to a legacy system. The receiver unit performs packet synchronization, error correction, extraction of stream quality metrics and re-encapsulation of the payload data into an internet protocol (IP) packet. These standard packets can then be sent over the existing network transport system to the range control center. At the range control center, the extracted stream quality metrics are used to select the best telemetry source in real-time. This paper provides a general discussion of the path to a fully realized, packet-based telemetry network and a brief but comprehensive overview of the Hypernet system architecture as a case study.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 18-21, 2004 / Town & Country Resort, San Diego, California / Based on a fourty year experience in Telemetry, acquired on the European Space Program, IN-SNEC company (Zodiac group) has designed a versatile, modular and customable telemetry system for Airbus A380 aircraft program. This Aircraft Telemetry System (TMA-2000) comes with a large set of acquisition boards allowing numerous digital and analog inputs. The major innovation of this system lies in its modularity which allows the user to configure his acquisition chain in function of his monitoring needs and the use of an Ethernet link for its configuration as well as for telemetry output data flow.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 18-21, 2004 / Town & Country Resort, San Diego, California / MIL-STD-1553 has served the flight community well. However, in recent years several new high-speed bus standards have emerged that outperform 1553 in various respects such as data throughput and increased address space. During this time, mission requirements - including video and audio - have become more data intensive. Although some of these busses were not initially designed for the avionics industry (such as Ethernet, FireWire, and FibreChannel), they are potentially of interest as high-speed commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions for both set-up and data acquisition. These busses offer not only improved overall system performance, in terms of aggregate sampling rates, but also simplify existing data acquisition system architectures. They require fewer high-bandwidth links which can serve for both set-up and data. This paper examines some of these issues, focusing in particular on IEEE1394, better known as FireWire.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 20-23, 2003 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / The efficient distribution of telemetry data via standard Ethernet networks has become an increasingly important part of telemetry system designs. While there are several methods and architectures to choose from, a solution based on IP multicast transmission provides for a fast and efficient method of distributing data from a single source to multiple clients. This data distribution method allows for increased scalability as data servers are no longer required to service individual client connections, and network bandwidth is minimized with multiple network clients being simultaneously serviced via a single data transmission.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 20-23, 2003 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / There is growing interest in the airborne instrumentation community to adopt commercial standards to obtain scalable data rates, standards based interoperability, and utilization of Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) products to reduce system costs. However, there has been few such data acquisition systems developed to date. L-3 Telemetry East has developed a prototype called the Network Data Acquisition System (NetDAS), which is based on the 10/100 Base-T Ethernet standard, TCP/UDP/IP network protocols and an industrial Ethernet switch. NetDAS has added network capability to the legacy MPC-800 telemetry system by replacing the existing formatter module with a formatter/controller based on a COTS CPU module and a custom designed bridge module. NetDAS has demonstrated transmission bit rates as high as 20 Mbps from a single unit using UDP/IP and an Ethernet switch. The NetDAS system has also demonstrated scalable and distributed architecture.

ITC/USA 2009 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Fifth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 26-29, 2009 / Riviera Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / The integrated Network Enhanced Telemetry (iNET) project was launched to foster network enhanced instrumentation and telemetry. The program is currently implementing an operational demonstration. That will involve installing and using a network enhanced instrumentation system on a helicopter. This demonstration will be used as a learning exercise for the implementation of network technologies. This paper will give a brief description of the operational demonstration. Then it will explore the need for an Authority to Operate (ATO) and describe how one was obtained.

ITC/USA 2009 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Fifth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 26-29, 2009 / Riviera Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / With the emergence of higher bandwidth Ethernet networks on ranges, many ranges are converting their data transport from ATM(Asynchronous Transfer Mode) networks to Ethernet networks. Both networks have their respective advantages and disadvantages, however one reoccurring issue is product interoperability. The RCC (Range Commanders Council) TTG (Telecommunications and Timing Group) created the Telemetry over IP (TMoIP 218-07) solution with input from various ranges and vendors to solve this issue. This specification allows ranges to use different vendors together for Telemetry over Ethernet, based on specific needs at each site. This paper targets those who are thinking about converting from ATM to Ethernet networks.

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 / Teletronics Technology Corp. has been involved in the research and development of networked data acquisition systems for use in airborne instrumentation for several years. Recently, TTC successfully applied the advanced technology that was developed during these airborne efforts to a terrestrial application involving Army ground vehicles. The Future Combat Systems Program (FCS) for the U.S. Army recently solicited a networked-based solution to the problem of acquiring real-time data specific to the training of soldiers operating visual targeting systems within Bradley Armored Vehicles and Abrams Battle Tanks. This paper describes the High-Speed Digital Recording system, a network-based data acquisition system designed to allow for the recording of high-resolution (up to 1600x1280) RGB video, user-selected Ethernet packets, along with audio and GPS time information.