An Elastically Controlled Network Technology for Remote Testing and Monitoring

NASA seeks innovative concepts for propulsion test operations to reduce costs, improve reliability, and increase performance. One area is network protocol implementation for fast data communication and transfer among intelligent devices, such as sensors, controllers, etc. In NASA's system test and monitoring scenarios, sensors and controllers are often dispersed to remote locations causing the deterministic timing relationship among sensor data to become very important. Furthermore, mechanical and human decision making data processing must be included in the data communication process to enhance overall system performance. This requires advanced TCP/IP based packet data network protocols to replace conventional control network protocols such as RS-232/422/485, fieldbus, etc. Unfortunately, due to jitter and delay, TCP/IP packet data communication standards and their protocols are not robust in the timing relationship of sensor data remotely transferred in the network. To address this need, Broadata Communications, Inc. (BCI) proposes a unique, elastically-controlled data network (ECDN) technology to support high performance, remote testing applications. The ECDN will allow deterministic control of multiple, diverse sensor data stream characteristics, each with different clock speed, data bandwidth, jitter requirement, and delay variation. In other words, ECDN will compensate for network uncertainties encountered by individual sensor data streams.