International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 20-23, 2003 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / In our prior work [1] we proposed that network-centric data telemetry systems offer substantial improvements over traditional serial data telemetry systems. This paper is a follow up to that work and is also a companion to our experimentation paper [2]. In network-centric telemetry systems, there can be many infrastructure sites that form the network’s ad hoc communications paths, and there can be many fast-moving nodes, e.g., munitions, which enter the network, generate telemetry data, and exit the network. As the geographic size of such data telemetry networks grows, constraints on link margin will typically preclude a one-to-one matching of ground-based infrastructure sites to airborne, fast-moving nodes. That is, the fast-moving nodes will traverse distances that will require the mobile node to change which specific ground node it communicates with to transfer telemetry data. This paper describes an analytic model for the generic process of a fast moving node entering a wireless network and the associated handoffs of that node among ground stations as the fast mover traverses the spatial region covered by the wireless network. Our analysis and associated worst-case example demonstrate that wireless networking technology can handle the stress of rapidly managing connectivity to high-speed nodes for effective telemetry data extraction.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 20-23, 2003 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / This paper is a follow up to a paper presented at ITC 2002 entitled “Wireless Local Area Network for Data Telemetry from Fast Moving Nodes” by R. J. Bamberger, G. R. Barrett, R. A. Nichols, and J. L. Burbank of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, and M. H. Lauss of the Yuma Test Center at the U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground (YPG). In that paper, network-centric data telemetry systems, specifically those based on commercial off- the-shelf (COTS) technologies such as the IEEE 802.11b Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN), were offered as an improvement over traditional frequency modulated (FM) data telemetry systems. The feasibility study of using WLANs for data telemetry considered both the radio frequency (RF) link over extended ranges and the effect due to Doppler shift. This paper describes an experiment designed to test those previous analyses.