High Performance Networked Telemetry (HYPERNET)

Currently, military-flight test ranges use a variety of transmission methods and protocols to receive, collect, and analyze air-to-ground telemetry data. Custom methods that are expensive to deploy and maintain are required to transport, synchronize, and select the best stream. Furthermore, with the current mixture of wireless, optical fiber, and wired transport methods and protocols the problem is made even more difficult. The recent trend in the commercial telecommunications industry is to move toward an all internet protocol (IP) based network structure. If these high-performance, cost-effective hardware and software solutions could be applied to military flight-test ranges, it would result in lower life-cycle costs and reduced operational complexity. Therefore, the objective of this project is to develop an operationally suitable real-time IP based telemetry transport mechanism that satisfies the quality of service, stream alignment, and stream selection with minimum latency deviation at a reasonable cost. During phase I, Nova Engineering has developed an architecture that significantly enhances the state-of-the-art in air-to-ground telemetry. This architecture may be a major step towards realizing the Air Force's long-range vision of making range telemetry data available from the aircraft to the desktop. The program will conclude with a demonstration at Edwards Air Force base.