AN ETHERNET BASED AIRBORNE DATA ACQUISITION SYSTEM

Abstract

There is growing interest in the airborne instrumentation community to adopt commercial standards to obtain scalable data rates, standards based interoperability, and utilization of Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) products to reduce system costs. However, there has been few such data acquisition systems developed to date. L-3 Telemetry East has developed a prototype called the Network Data Acquisition System (NetDAS), which is based on the 10/100 Base-T Ethernet standard, TCP/UDP/IP network protocols and an industrial Ethernet switch. NetDAS has added network capability to the legacy MPC-800 telemetry system by replacing the existing formatter module with a formatter/controller based on a COTS CPU module and a custom designed bridge module. NetDAS has demonstrated transmission bit rates as high as 20 Mbps from a single unit using UDP/IP and an Ethernet switch. The NetDAS system has also demonstrated scalable and distributed architecture.