ACQUISITION AND DISTRIBUTION OF TSPI DATA USING COTS HARDWARE OVER AN ETHERNET NETWORK

Abstract

The Western Aeronautical Test Range (WATR) operates the ground stations for research vehicles operating at the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center (DFRC). Recently, the WATR implemented a new system for distributing Time, Space, and Position Information (TSPI) data. The previous system for processing this data was built on archaic hardware that is no longer supported, running legacy software with no upgrade path. The purpose of the Radar Information Processing System (RIPS) is to provide the ability to acquire TSPI data from a variety of sources and process the data for subsequent distribution to other destinations located at the various DFRC facilities. RIPS is built of commercial, off the shelf (COTS) hardware installed in Personal Computers (PC). Data is transported between these computers on a Gigabit Ethernet network. The software was developed using C++ with a modular, object-oriented design approach.