Recent NetAcquire White Papers
NetAcquire Corporation recently presented a new White Paper at the International Telemetering Conference 2004:
Real-Time TENA Enabled Data Gateway
This paper describes the TENA architecture, which has been proposed by the Foundation Initiative 2010 (FI 2010) project as the basis for future US Test Range software systems. The benefits of this new architecture are explained by comparing the future TENA-enabled range infrastructure with the current situation of largely non-interoperable range resources.
Legacy equipment and newly acquired off-the-shelf equipment that does not directly support TENA can be integrated into a TENA environment using TENA Gateways. This paper focuses on issues related to the construction of such gateways, including the important issue of real-time requirements when dealing with real-world data acquisition instruments. The benefits of leveraging commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) Data Acquisition Systems that are based on true real-time operating systems are discussed in the context of TENA Gateway construction.
White Papers from ITC 2003
Improving Real-Time Latency Performance on COTS Architecture
Telemetry and other aerospace systems designed to support the current needs of mission-critical applications often have stringent real-time requirements. These systems must guarantee a maximum worst-case processing and response time when incoming data is received. These real-time tolerances continue to tighten as data rates increase.
At the same time, end user requirements for COTS pricing efficiencies have forced many telemetry systems to now run on desktop operating systems like Windows or Unix. While these desktop operating systems offer advanced user interface capabilities, they cannot meet the real-time requirements of the many mission-critical telemetry applications. Furthermore, attempts to enhance desktop operating systems to support real-time constraints have met with only limited success.
This paper presents a telemetry system architecture that offers real-time guarantees while at the same time extensively leveraging inexpensive COTS hardware and software components. This is accomplished by partitioning the telemetry system onto two processors. The first processor is a NetAcquire subsystem running a real-time operating system (RTOS). The second processor runs a desktop operating system running the user interface. The two processors are connected together with a high-speed Ethernet IP internetwork. This architecture affords an improvement of two orders of magnitude over the real-time performance of a standalone desktop operating system.
Transparent Satellite/Wireless TCP Bandwidth Acceleration
While the transition to IP internetworking in space-based and other wireless aerospace applications has a tremendous upside, there are significant challenges of communications efficiency and compatibility to overcome. This paper describes a very high efficiency, low-risk, incremental architecture for migrating to IP internetworking based on the use of proxies. In addition to impressive gains in communications bandwidth, the architecture provides encapsulation of potentially volatile decisions such as particular vendors and network technologies.
The specific benchmarking architecture is a NetAcquire Corporation COTS telemetry system that includes built-in TCP-Tranquility (also known as SCPS-TP) and Reed-Solomon Forward Error Correction capabilities as well as a specialized proxy-capable network stack. Depending on network conditions, we will show that the effective bandwidth for satellite transmissions can be increased as much as a factor of one hundred with no external changes to existing internetworking equipment.