A SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE FOR THE DISTRIBUTION OF REAL-TIME TSPI

Abstract

The Range Instrumentation and Control System (RICS) is the twenty-first century replacement for an aging time-space-position information (TSPI) distribution and collection system used by the 46th Test Wing at Eglin AFB, Florida. The purpose of the RICS is to collect TSPI and distribute it across a wide area network in real-time. It will utilize a multi-threaded C++ program on VxWorks (a real-time operating system by Wind River Systems) to acquire TSPI from a radar system. The acquired data will be multicast to several local area networks where the data will be recorded and displayed in real-time using a Java program on the Linux operating system. This paper describes the design process and design rationale for developing a distributed, real-time, heterogeneous system.