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. Typically, the aircraft or missile under test transmits real-time telemetry data to a collection ofground receiving sites. The remote sites then send multiple data streams to a centralized range control center for analysis to produce a comprehensive record of the entire mission. Because the streaming data is normally encrypted and has no structure,custom transport and recombining methods are required that are expensive to deploy and maintain. Furthermore, the problem of synchronizing the raw data streams is made even more difficult with the current mixture of wireless, optical fiber, and wiredtransport methods and protocols.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-testranges, 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. Changing from the current air-to-ground telemetry transport system (raw data over multiple protocols with custom recombining equipment) to an IP based infrastructure will significantly reduce the recurring deployment cost as well as the overalloperational complexity. Additionally, an IP-based transport and analysis system will allow new capabilities including robust and economical data collection, simplified timing reconstruction, and it will accomplish a major step towards realizing the AirForce's long-range vision of making range telemetry data available from the aircraft to the desktop.