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 / The Integrated Network Enhanced Telemetry (iNET) Project established a standards working group to address the integrated management of telemetry network systems and to ensure interoperability among various pieces of equipment. The group has been studying the benefits and drawbacks of various system management technologies with the goal of identifying a set of management interfaces which will provide long-range benefit to a large and diverse telemetry test system. This paper discusses control, configuration, status, performance, and fault management. It addresses these from several viewpoints such as multi-test articles, multi-ranges, and dynamic test environments.

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 / One of the principle goals of the Integrated Network Enhanced Telemetry (iNET) program is to help flight-test engineers configure their data acquisition systems more rapidly. This will allow them to focus more of their energies on the collection of data rather than on the design and configuration of their data acquisition hardware. Currently most flight-test engineers spend the majority of their time configuring their data acquisition systems to acquire data for test flights. Typically, the flight test engineers must manually transform the requirements that are given to them into actual measurements from the data acquisition system. This process forces the flight test engineers to become experts in the implementation details of their data acquisition systems. This paper will discuss a possible design for an automatic hardware selection system. This system would allow flight test engineers to step away from the implementation details of their data acquisition system and focus instead on the parameter data that the system is acquiring. The key design goal for this system is to create a mechanism that can automatically transform the requirements for a flight test program into a list of hardware that can accomplish the desired task.

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 / iNET is a project tasked to foster advances in networking and telemetry technology to meet emerging needs. This paper describes one objective of the project, which is standardization and interoperability. It begins to explore issues for achieving a level of interoperability among differing vendor’s hardware such as data acquisition units, data recorders, video systems, transceivers, and network encryption. Specifically, this paper addresses the expansion of the current demonstration system with the addition of multiple vendor data acquisition units. It will also attempt to address the level of standardization necessary for achieving interoperability while still enabling vendors to add their value added contributions into their products.

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 / As part of Morgan’s iNET development, the Mixed Cellular and Mobile Ad hoc Network (MCMN) architecture has been 1proposed to provide coverage to over-the horizon test articles. Nodes in MCMN are assigned to one of three possible modes- Ad hoc, Cellular or Gateway. We present architecture for the proposed MCMN and some performance analysis to characterize the network. The problem of organizing nodes in this mixed network with optimal configuration is significant. This configuration gives nodes ability to know the best mode to operate and communicate with other nodes. Node organization is critical to the performance of the mixed network and to improve communication. The configuration of nodes required to optimally organize nodes in MCMN is demonstrated. The problem of evaluating configuration parameters for nodes in a mixed network is a nonlinear and complex one. This is due to the various components like the number of nodes, geographical location, signal strength, mobility, connectivity and others that are involved. Clustering techniques and algorithms have been used in literature to partition networks into clusters to support routing and network management. A clustering technique is employed to dynamically partition the aggregate network into Cluster Cells (CCs). A gateway node is selected for each CC which relays traffic from the cellular to the Ad hoc and vice versa. A trade-off analysis of the cellular boundary is presented using the maximum of the minimum data rate in the network. Numerical analysis and experiments are provided to show that the coverage can be extended to test articles in over-the-horizon region. It is also shown that, when the network is well organized, performance is improved.

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 / Network-based instrumentation systems are rapidly replacing traditional fixed serial interconnected instrumentation in both commercial and military flight test environments. Modern network-based flight test systems are composed of large numbers of devices including high-speed network switches, data acquisition devices, recorders, telemetry interfaces, and wireless network transceivers, all of which must be managed in a coordinated fashion. Management of the network system includes configuring, controlling, and monitoring the health and status of the various devices. Configuration by hand is not a realistic option, so algorithms for automatic management must be implemented to make these systems economical and practical. This paper describes the issues that must be addressed for managing network-based flight test systems and describes a network management approach that was developed and employed to manage a large-scale network-based flight test system.

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 / When network-centric flight test system components are developed concurrently, it is necessary to produce relevant simulated network traffic for exercising the network devices and other processing subsystems prior to system integration. Having an accurate and repeatable pattern of simulated network traffic is extremely important for debugging and subsystem integration. The simulated network traffic must be both representative of the real system and repeatable to aid test efforts. Our solution to this problem was to develop a model-driven network traffic generator – NETGEN. Using NETGEN to resolve errors, stress test, and verify requirements, we have achieved otherwise unattainable correctness, reliability, and success in our systems.

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 / Many engineers express frustration with the multitude of vendor specific tools required to describe measurements and configure data acquisition systems. In general, tools are incompatible between vendors, forcing the engineer to enter the same or similar data multiple times. With the emergence of XML technologies, user centric data modeling for the flight test community is now possible. With this new class of technology, a vendor neutral, standard language to define measurements and configure systems may finally be realized. However, the allure of such a universal language can easily become too abstract, making it untenable for hardware configuration and resulting in a low vendor adoption rate. Conversely, a language that caters too much to vendor specific configuration will defeat its purpose. Achieving this careful balance is not trivial, but is possible. Doing so will produce a useful standard without putting it out of the reach of equipment vendors. This paper discusses the concept, merits, and possible solutions for a standard measurement metadata model. Practical solutions using XML and related technologies are discussed.

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 / In modern flight test installations there is a continuing trend to move the data acquisition closer to the sensors. As a consequence the data acquisition chassis needs to be mounted in locations that are small, inaccessible and subject to harsh environmental conditions. On top of this there are an increasing number of measurements required for each new flight test campaign. This paper discusses the challenges of designing a small lightweight data acquisition chassis which can provide hundreds of channels of measurement capability while operating in tight spaces which are exposed to fluids, high vibration and extremes of temperature. The paper suggests ways of designing and installing the data acquisition chassis in order to optimize the available installation space while mitigating the effects of the harsh environmental conditions.

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 / In the iNET community, communications between Test Articles (TA) and Ground Station (GS) can be over a long distance course that places a TA at ranges where they are sometimes beyond line-of-sight (LoS) or over-the-horizon communications with the GS. In other cases, the TA moves out of the LoS communications range of GS. There is a need to provide communications to these TA at these over-the-horizon locations. The Cellular and Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) have attracted a lot of attention recently and the field continues to grow daily. The cellular network offers high capacity but limited in coverage due to its fixed base infrastructure. MANET on the other hand has a wide range of coverage and also high data rates, but its throughput performance is reduced at high capacity. The MANET cellular mixture network (MCMN) has been proposed to provide an extensive communications between the TA and GS in the iNET environment. This work presents a performance evaluation and analysis of the two different networks with respect to the performance needs of iNET environment which include coverage and throughput.

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 / The integrated Network Enhanced Telemetry (iNET) program has developed standards for network-based telemetry systems, which implementers and range users of Telemetry Network System (TmNS) equipment can use to promote interoperability between components. While standards promote interoperability, only implementation of the standards can ensure it. This paper discusses the tools that are being developed by the iNET program which implement the technologies and protocols specified in the iNET standards in order to ensure interoperability between TmNS components and provide a general framework for device development. Capabilities provided by the tools include system management, TmNS message processing, metadata processing, and time synchronization.