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 / A previous paper was presented detailing the design and testing of the first networked demonstration system (ITC 2006) for iNET. This paper extends that work by testing a commercial off the shelf (COTS) solution for the wireless network connection of the Telemetry Network System (TmNS). This paper will briefly discuss specific pieces of the airborne and ground station system but will concentrate on the new wireless network link, how it was tested, and how well it performed. Flight testing results will be presented accessing the performance of the wireless network link.

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 growth of the Internet and the resulting increasing speeds and decreasing prices of network equipment have spurred much interest in applying networks to flight test applications. However, the best-effort, variable-latency nature of network transport causes challenges that must be addressed to provide reliable data acquisition and timing performance. This paper describes the major issues that must be addressed when designing and implementing real-time networking applications. An overview of a recently implemented large-scale, network-centric data acquisition, recording, and telemetry system for commercial flight test applications provides a real-world example of what is currently achievable.

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 / At the 2007 iNet Technology Demonstrator multiple vendors are asked to participate to develop and evaluate protocols for time synchronization, configuration identification and heterogeneous data packet transfer. The iNet initiative from RCC is aimed at focusing and collating telemetry network developments within the wider sphere of commercial and military network developments. The KAM-500 is an inherently networked data-acquisition system offering seamless gateways to many heterogeneous data sources, such as different sensor devices, avionics-busses, networks and video sources. This paper offers insights into the impact of traffic and network configuration on the performance of heterogeneous data acquisition in a homogenous-switched network based a 1588 enabled controller module.

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 / This paper baselines the performance of common, single band telemetry blade antennas in two telemetry bands and compares that performance to two very differing multi-band antenna designs. A description of each antenna is presented followed by flight testing results and conclusions. Results are in the form of received signal strength versus geographic location, derived in-flight antenna patterns, link availability, and bit error analysis.

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 / An rfNET solution based on IEEE 802.11 wireless network is presented to perform one-way remote transmission of airborne instrumentation data and multi-channel video images in flight test by modifying the wireless network bridge and UDP protocol. Its architecture and structure is introduced briefly and the results of ground transmission test and flight demonstration transmission are provided. It also points out the major problems of this solution for engineering application and their solutions.

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 presents the design for secure IP multicasting in an iNet environment using public key cryptography. Morgan State University has been conducting research to improve the telemetry network by improving network performance, implementing IP (Internet Protocol) multicasting and providing a stronger security system for the iNet environment. The present study describes how IP multicasting could be implemented to provide more secure communication in the iNet environment by reducing traffic and optimizing network performance. The multicast of data is closely tied to the key management center for secure applications. This paper develops a means of delivering keys between two or more parties showing a relationship between the multicast network and the Key Management Center (KMC). The KMC is an element of the system which distributes and manages session keys among multicast members. A public key encryption method is used to address the distribution of session keys in the multicast network. The paper will present a system level design of multicast and key management with dual encryption of session keys for the iNet system.

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 / This is the story of three projects, which use three different research funding sources, coming together to demonstrate a small, but complete, instrumentation system that advances several technologies. The Onboard Smart Sensor (OSS) project is a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project that incorporates IEEE 1451.4 sensors into an existing Common Airborne Instrumentation System (CAIS) based instrumentation system. These sensors are "smart" in that they can self-identify basic information via a Transducer Electronic Data Sheet (TEDS). The Enhanced Query Data Recorder (EQDR) is being developed under the T&E Science & Technology Spectrum Efficient Technology (S&T SET) portfolio. This recorder is based on the integrated Network Enhanced Telemetry (iNET) specifications. One of the objectives of iNET is to be able to query a recorder in real-time and transfer the request across a network telemetry link. The third project provides Pulse Code Modulation (PCM) backfill to compensate for dropouts. One of the envisioned applications enabled by the iNET architecture is the ability to provide PCM displays in the control room that do not have dropouts. This is called PCM Backfill. The basic scenario is that PCM is both transmitted (as it traditionally has been via serial streaming telemetry (SST)) and recorded onboard. When dropouts occur, a request over the telemetry network is made to the recorder (the EQDR in this case) and the dropped portions of the PCM stream are sent over the telemetry network to backfill the ground display. By adding a PCM-to- Ethernet/iNET bridge, the OSS and legacy instrumentation system can provide data to both the standard PCM and to the EQDR. Combined, this mini-system demonstrates a vision of having intelligence and networking ability across the entire instrumentation system – from sensor to display.

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 / The Enhanced Query Data Recorder (EQDR) has been developed under the Test Resource Management Center's (TRMC) Spectrum Efficient Technologies (SET) T&E S&T program. The EQDR is a network flight recorder built around the iNET standards and which is intended to meet the future needs of the networked telemetry environment. The EQDR is designed to support the "fetch" of recorded test data during a test without interruption to the ongoing recording of data from the test article vehicle network. The key benefits of the network data recorder as implemented in the EQDR are increased flexibility and efficiency of test in an environment with increasing demands on spectrum available for telemetered data. EQDR enables retrieval of individual recorded parameters on an as-needed basis. Having the flexibility to send data only when it is required rather than throughout the duration of the test significantly increases the efficiency with which limited spectrum resources are used. EQDR enables parametric-level data retrieval, based not only on time interval and data source, but also on the content of the recorded data messages. EQDR enables selective, efficient retrieval of individual parameters using indexes derived from the actual values of recorded data.

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 / Network-based telemetry systems have unprecedented amounts of flexibility due to the ability to manipulate configuration during a test. As a result of this flexibility, multiple tests can be conducted in a single flight; all it takes is reconfiguration of instrumentation. However, configuration of devices can be a complex task, and dynamic configuration can be even more daunting. As such, device configuration, control, and status must be managed in a coordinated fashion. A system manager implementation that performs coordinated status and control of instrumentation in the Test Article as well as test configuration authoring is presented in this paper, the Ground Test Article Manager (GTAM), which is being developed by the integrated Network Enhanced Telemetry (iNET) program.

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 Test Resource Management Center's (TRMC) Spectrum Efficient Technologies (SET) S&T program is sponsoring development of the Enhanced Query Data Recorder (EQDR), a network flight recorder that is intended to meet the future needs of the networked telemetry environment. EQDR is designed to support the "fetch" of recorded test data during a test without interrupting the ongoing recording of data from the test article vehicle network. The key benefits of the network data recorder as implemented in EQDR are increased flexibility and efficiency of test in an environment with increasing demands on spectrum available for telemetered data. EQDR enables retrieval of individual recorded parameters on an as-needed basis. Having the flexibility to send data only when it is required rather than throughout the duration of the test significantly increases the efficiency with which limited spectrum resources are used. EQDR enables parametric-level data retrieval, based not only on time interval and data source, but also on the content of the recorded data messages. EQDR enables selective, efficient retrieval of individual parameters using indexes derived from the actual values of recorded data. This paper describes the design of EQDR and the benefits of selective data storage and retrieval in the application of networked telemetry. In addition it describes the performance of the EQDR in terms of data recording and data retrieval rates when implemented on single board computers designed for use in the aeronautical test environment with size, weight, and power constraints.