ITC/USA 2015 Conference Proceedings / The Fifty-First Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 26-29, 2015 / Bally's Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, NV / Through the use of early iNET-prototype IP Transceiver technology, Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Ltd. (KHI) has been able to communicate with flight test vehicles during a recent research program. This technology provides a two-way high-capacity communication that has not been achieved with conventional telemetry and can be used not only for flight testing, but also for rescue work. KHI has been authorized to use S-band IP Transceivers since last year in Japan, and various communication tests have been performed. This paper describes Japan's first simulation of an iNET RF network which incorporated testing that performed data backfill, voice communication and video transmission. A data backfilling test was performed using retransmit of lock-off data (which is lost as the aircraft maneuvers) on command from the ground station. Moreover, a tethered aerostat is considered a very useful communication relay platform in the event of a large-scale disaster which results in the destruction of infrastructure. Also, the silence of an aerostat can be very important for search and rescue work.

ITC/USA 2011 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Seventh Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 24-27, 2011 / Bally's Las Vegas, Las Vegas, Nevada / On the surface, network-based telemetry systems would appear to be simple, stateless, information collecting entities. Unfortunately, the reality of networking technologies brings a hierarchy of control loops into the system setup. At the top level, the command and status collection data loop that users manipulate the system with is a feedback loop. The commands themselves are transmitted across the network through competing streams of data, which are guided and controlled by Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) mechanisms. TCP mechanisms themselves have control loops in order to avoid congestion, provide reliability, and generally optimize flow. These TCP streams flowing across a network fabric compete at choke points, such as network switches, routers, and wireless telemetry links - all of which are also guided by control loops. This paper discusses the hierarchy of control loops present in a TmNS, provides an analysis of how these loops interact, and describes key points to be considered for telemetry systems.

ITC/USA 2011 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Seventh Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 24-27, 2011 / Bally's Las Vegas, Las Vegas, Nevada / Describing data formats has gone a long way in providing a common thread for moving test programs from one test range to another without incurring massive code rewrites. The introduction of the IRIG 106-93 standard provided the Telemetry Attributes Transfer Standard (TMATS) to achieve interoperability between the test article and ground processing system. The integrated Network Enhanced Telemetry (iNET) Metadata Description Language (MDL) extends the concept to include descriptions of the equipment configuration and setup. This MDL declarative language is both vendor neutral and vendor customizable (where needed) and extends interoperability down to the individual components of the instrumentation system. This paper describes the current state of MDL and its use across intended vendor lines.

ITC/USA 2011 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Seventh Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 24-27, 2011 / Bally's Las Vegas, Las Vegas, Nevada / Today's telemetry systems need to be highly configurable and easily extensible to support a constantly growing number of data acquisition/transmitting components from different manufacturers. One way to achieve this goal is through a standardized descriptive language that can define the system structure as well as end-node devices. The integrated Network Enhanced Telemetry (iNET) program has explored such a possibility by creating a series of standards to define how devices are configured and interoperate with each other. As one of the standards created by the iNET program, the Metadata Description Language (MDL) specifies a common interchange language that defines and configures a Telemetry Network System (TmNS). MDL Instance Documents are used to exchange test requirements, data formats and configuration information among the devices within a TmNS system. MDL, together with other standards created in the iNET program, serve as a foundation for assembling a modern telemetry system. This paper starts with an overview of the MDL-based system description architecture. A typical configuration workflow of an MDL-based system is then described. iNET functionality implementations for new and legacy devices are used as examples to illustrate the power of MDL-based design, as well as the challenges and issues associated with the implementation of the MDL standard. We explain and evaluate the design decisions for a new product, the L-3 NetDAS Recorder, as the case study. We also discuss how a legacy Data Acquisition Unit (DAU) acting as an LTC Data Source Unit can be updated to support MDL based iNET functionality. Our practice shows that more efficient data acquisition systems can be designed and implemented using the metadata definition language as a core tool for equipment and system description. We conclude the paper with design tradeoffs and discussions.

ITC/USA 2011 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Seventh Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 24-27, 2011 / Bally's Las Vegas, Las Vegas, Nevada / Bidirectional networked radio frequency (RF) communications between the ground and test articles are quickly becoming a normal mode of operation. Not only can devices be remotely controlled, but other networking technologies are emerging into flight test. Voice over IP (VoIP) is ubiquitous in the workplace and in homes, but it presents unique challenges when used to communicate between test articles. This paper presents some issues to be considered and test results to help aid deployment of VoIP systems in network-based test systems such as iNET's Telemetry Network System (TmNS).

ITC/USA 2011 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Seventh Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 24-27, 2011 / Bally's Las Vegas, Las Vegas, Nevada / This paper discusses simulating iNET's protocol stack using OPNET Modeler. It shows an example of a custom protocol simulated in OPNET Modeler, and how to model the test article, and ground station as reusable components for future simulation. Network simulation is a critical tool for iNET as it enables design decisions that cannot be made analytically due to the complexity of the problem. This work addresses the incorporation of iNET's protocol stack into the OPNET Modeler tool set as this piece of iNET is unique and is not available in OPNET Modeler.

ITC/USA 2014 Conference Proceedings / The Fiftieth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 20-23, 2014 / Town and Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, CA / Network-based telemetry systems have unprecedented amounts of flexibility due to the ability to monitor, control, configure, coordinate, and visualize the operations of the flight test system. As a result of this flexibility, multiple tests can be conducted in a single flight; all it takes is reconfiguration of portions of the system. However, management of such a dynamic system is a complex task. As such, the integrated Network Enhanced Telemetry (iNET) Program is currently developing a System Manager application to provide a model for coordinated management of networked telemetry. The System Manager provides a user application for monitoring, controlling, configuring, coordinating, and visualizing the operations of the Telemetry Network System (TmNS) network. This paper describes the key requirements, capabilities, and development approach of the System Manager.

ITC/USA 2013 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Ninth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 21-24, 2013 / Bally's Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, NV / Telemetry Network System (TmNS) contains a centralized link manager which allows efficient use of the frequency spectrum by dynamically allocating capacity to transmit based on need and priority. To verify the accurate operation of the telemetry system link management algorithm prior to system demonstration, a combination of novel techniques were leveraged in the areas of modeling and simulation, and test bed verification. This paper will cover the process of verifying the link management algorithm from the use of the OPNET iNET simulation to test bed radio simulators along with the developed test bed tools used to capture the results.

ITC/USA 2013 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Ninth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 21-24, 2013 / Bally's Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, NV / This paper shows the design and testing of a test bed at Morgan State University as part of the development of a Link Dependent Adaptive Radio (LDAR). It shows the integration of variable rate QAM/OFDM modulation and a variable rate Punctured Convolutional Coder. It also shows a dynamic aeronautical channel simulator developed to capture the dynamics of these channels. Performance results are show for combinations of modulation, coding and channel variations that provide motivation for the potential of the LDAR system.

ITC/USA 2012 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Eighth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 22-25, 2012 / Town and Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, California / The execution of experimental Flight Test Campaign (FTC) provides all information required for the aircraft development, operation and certification. Typically the execution of a FTC encompasses three major systems as follows: Flight Test Instrumentation System (FTI) that is basically a measurement system; Real-Time Telemetry Link (RTL); and Ground Telemetry System (GTS). At the early days, for the development of small aircrafts (i.e. Fighter), the primary source for FTI data was provided by the RTL due to inherent limitations of the open reel airborne data recorders (i.e. media and size), operating under high-dynamics condition. Nowadays with the introduction of solid-state data recording devices, data integrity and reliability is no longer an issue. At the ITC 2010 Blue Ribbon Panel, Mr. Thomas Beard, the executive Director of the Air Force Flight Test Center in Edwards Air Force Base emphasized the need to reduce refly and to improve FTC efficiency. Such statement imposes a new paradigm in Telemetry, which is to improve RTL integrity and reliability level equivalent to the solid-state data recording devices. Therefore the Telemetry community will be able to execute test point validation for refly reduction and quasi realtime data reduction analysis for efficiency improvement. The major solutions that address such issue are Spatial Diversity (SD) architectures and the iNet. The SD solution requires multiple antenna system (which is very expensive) that could still produce ineffective results at high-dynamics test points (e.g. Spin). At the beginning the iNet consortium proposed the usage of TCP protocol for data transmission. Problems associated with TCP limitations such as data latency and overhead lead to the usage of UDP protocol that does not guarantee the packet delivery. To properly address these issues the IPEV R&D group proposes the iPCM Telemetry architecture to be used as RTL. The iPCM uses hybrid architecture for data transmission taking the advantage of legacy digital transmitters combined with iNet-based transceivers to retrieve missing data. The development and the evaluation of iPCM architecture will be executed as a PhD Thesis in ITA University. The expected performance and benefits of iPCM are presented and discussed.