Synchronized Distributed Test and Measurement

Description:

Through the development of more and more complex systems, the requirement for test- and measurement applications increase as well. These applications communicate over buses with a multitude of distributed sensors and actuators, partially over long distances, and produce respectively collect large amount of data. Consequently the demands to new bus technologies do increase for test- and measurement applications. Existing technologies such as General Purpose Instrumentation Bus (GPIB), nowadays reach their limits, caused by limited bandwidth and the amount of devices that could be connected to the bus. The development of IEEE 1588 Precision Time Protocol (PTP) and LAN eXtension for Instrumentation (LXI) offers not only a solution for the named problems rather it offers a solution for accurate timestamping distributed data. Through IEEE 1588, Ethernet could be used as communication medium and clock synchronisation with a precision of some nanoseconds can be reached.

This work is going to take the next step in distributed test- and measurement applications and develops a concept for synchronously performing measurements that include feedback from the environment into the instruments. It comprises automatic network latency calibration, delayed synchronization triggering, detection of and correction for packet loss and error handling.