TENA and NetAcquire

TENA middleware was developed by the U.S. Department of Defense to serve as a advanced foundation for the next generation of network-centric systems. The combination of TENA middleware and NetAcquire hardware/software systems offers a major enhancement to networked aerospace data collection systems:-

1. Standardized, vendor-neutral interfaces to telemetry, radar, and data acquisition systems
2. Pre-engineered and tested middleware available at no-charge to government user
3. Fully distributed network capability, in addition to being backward compatible with most non-networked legacy equipment, such as mid- generation radars
4. Guaranteed real-time performance designed to meet low-latency, deterministic requirements
5. Powerful publish/subscribe data distribution to unlimited network destinations

TENA directly targets the interoperability and reuse needs of networked aerospace applications by defining:

1. A standard mechanism for efficiently communicating structured data (objects) over network.
2. Pre-engineered vendor-neutral interfaces for common aerospace objects as well as a powerful extension mechanism for creating new interfaces.

TENA defines general-purpose objects that represent telemetry - and range - related entities such as radar systems, telemetry feeds, aircraft and other moving objects, and time/space coordinates. For example, a complex operation such as retrieving the real-time coordinates of an aircraft becomes a call to a TENA function such as Aircraft.TSPI.Position(). TENA middleware communicates over any IP network and is available for deployment now.

NetAcquire Background
NetAcquire systems are highly re-configurable, real-time telemetry and data acquisition products. Their field-proven COTS architecture dramatically reduces system cost while at the same time providing straightforward, flexible support for almost any type of I/O signal, data format, and real-time data processing requirement. NetAcquire products provide TENA middleware with the real-world interfaces necessary to implement a wide range of TENA-compliant solutions and NetAcquire products are all available with a pre-installed TENA middleware option. NetAcquire products also run a true real-time operating system, which in turn allows TENA to run in guaranteed real-time. This support for low-latency, deterministic system operation opens the door for TENA deployments into the widest possible range of mission-critical aerospace data collection applications.

TENA/NetAcquire Example --A Radar Gateway
Most mid-generation radars lack network capability, requiring communication using legacy serial data protocols and limiting interoperability.NetAcquire systems provide built-in synchronous serial and digital interfaces for directly connecting to almost any existing radar. Serial data from the radar is ingested, converted into appropriate user coordinates, and published onto any network using TENA. This allows off-the-shelf PCs to easily access all radar control, status, and target data using convenient function calls supplied by TENA. For example, to point a radar, simply call: Radar.point(azimuth, elevation)

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Fox Business Network

Fox Business Network is a United States-based cable and satellite news channel that commenced broadcasting on October 15, 2007 at 5:00 a.m. Eastern Daylight Saving Time. It is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. The network is available to more than 30 million people.News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch confirmed the launch at his keynote address at the 2007 McGraw-Hill Media Summit on February 8, 2007. Day-to-day operations are run by Kevin Magee, executive vice president of Fox News; Neil Cavuto manages content and business news coverage.Murdoch had publicly stated that if the purchase of the Wall Street Journal went through and if it were legally possible, he would have rechristened the channel with a name that has "Journal" in it.[3] However, on July 11, 2007, the parent company, News Corp, announced that the new channel would be called Fox Business Network (FBN).[4] This name choice is because it better fits with the official business name of the Fox television network, Fox Broadcasting Company or FBC, and Fox News Channel had recently been branded FNC, as well as to avoid bad jokes stemming from an acronym such as BJ for Business Journal.[5]

The network is placed on channel 43 in the New York City market, an important market for financial news. It is paired with Fox News on the dial, which moved to channel 44. CNBC is on channel 15 under the Time Warner lineup in New York. [6] According to an article in MultiChannel News magazine, NBC Universal paid up to "several million dollars" in order to ensure that CNBC and Fox Business would be separated on the dial, and in order to retain CNBC's "premium" channel slot. [7] However, it is important to note that FBN is on only Time Warner analog in New York; in other markets, digital cable is required. [8] Verizon's FiOS TV, with 515,000 subscribers nationwide, also carries the network on its premier lineup, which most customers have. Dish Network does not carry FBN.

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BUSINESS NETWORKING

Business Network International (trademarked by its abbreviation BNI) is one of the world's largest business networking and referral companies.
It was founded in the USA in 1985 by Dr. Ivan Misner, who lectures and writes on networking and word-of-mouth marketing. BNI operates internationally and in 2007 has over 5,000 chapters in 36 countries. Its stated principle is "Givers' Gain" - by making business referrals for your chapter members, they will do the same for you. Groups allow only one person per profession to join and meet weekly all around the world

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AREA NETWORKS

Networks can be categorized in several different ways. One approach defines the type of network according to the geographic area it spans. Local area networks (LANs), for example, typically reach across a single home, whereas wide area networks (WANs), reach across cities, states, or even across the world. The Internet is the world's largest public WAN.

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NETWORKING CORE

Some Important Network Components

What Is a Router?

A router is a small hardware device that joins multiple networks together. These networks can include wired or wireless home networks, and the Internet.
Top 802.11g Wireless Routers for Home
The 802.11g standard supports much faster peer networking than the older 802.11b standard. These routers are designed to share a broadband Internet connection and usually contain a built-in firewall, DHCP server, and network switch.

Introduction to Hubs

A hub is a very simple hardware device that supports basic file sharing between computers connected with network cables.

What Is a Network Switch?

A network switches is a small hardware device that join multiple computers together at a low-level network protocol layer. Switches differ in capability from both hubs and routers.
What is the Difference Between a Hub and a Switch?
Switches are "smarter" than hubs, but what does that really mean? This article explains the difference between using hubs and switches in home computer networks.

FireWire - IEEE 1394

FireWire is a high performance networking standard based on a serial bus architecture similar to USB. You can use FireWire cables and connections for fast local file transfer.

What Is a Layer 3 Switch?

Traditional network switches operate at Layer 2 of the OSI model while network routers operate at Layer 3. This often leads to confusion over the definition of Layer 3 switch. Layer 3 switches actually differ very little from routers.

PCMCIA

PCMCIA is an industry organization best known for developing a standard network adapter called the PC Card. Many notebook computers contain two PCMCIA slots that hold one or two of these cards.

Bridge

In computer networking, a bridge divides a LAN into two segments, selectively forwarding traffic across the network boundary it defines. A bridge is not quite the same as a switch.

Repeater

Repeaters extend the distance a network can span by ensuring good signal quality.
RS-232
RS-232 is a telecommunications standard for connecting certain types of electronic equipment. RS-232 interfaces called ports are used on many older PC computers and modems.

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Connectionless packet switching and routing

Packets are routed to their destination as determined by a routing algorithm. The routing algorithm can create paths based on various metrics and desirable qualities of the routing path. For example, low latency may be of paramount concern and everything else is secondary, or a minimum hop count.
It's also entirely possible to have to weigh the various metrics against each other. For example, reducing the hop count could increase the latency to an unacceptable limit and some kind of balance would need to be found. For multi-parameter optimization, some form of optimization may be needed.
Once a route is determined for a packet, it is entirely possible that the route may change for the next packet, thus leading to a case where packets from the same source headed to the same destination could be routed differently.
Packet switching influenced the development of the Actor model of concurrent computation in which messages sent to the same address may be delivered in an order different from the order in which they were sent.

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Information On IP Addresses

Information On IP Addresses

How to find, change, hide and otherwise work with IP addresses

IP addresses are the fundamental method for computers to identify themselves on most computer networks. Every computer (or other network device) connected to the Internet has an IP address. This tutorial explains the basics of finding, changing, and hiding (your) my IP addresses.

Inside IP Addresses

IP addresses are written in a notation using numbers separated by dots. This is called "dotted-decimal" notation. Examples of IP addresses in dotted-decimal notation are 10.0.0.1 and 192.168.0.1 although many millions of different IP addresses exist.

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Packet switching in networks

Packet switching is used to optimize the use of the channel capacity available in a network, to minimize the transmission latency (i.e. the time it takes for data to pass across the network), and to increase robustness of communication.
The most well-known use of packet switching is the Internet and local area networks. The Internet uses the Internet protocol suite over a variety of data link layer protocols. For example, Ethernet and Frame relay are very common. Newer mobile phone technologies (e.g., GPRS, I-mode) also use packet switching.
X.25 is a notable use of packet switching in that, despite being based on packet switching methods, it provided virtual circuits to the user. These virtual circuits carry variable-length packets. In 1978, X.25 was used to provide the first international and commercial packet switching network, the International Packet Switched Service (IPSS). Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) also is a virtual circuit technology, which uses fixed-length cell relay connection oriented packet switching.
Datagram packet switching is also called connectionless networking because no connections are established. Technologies such as Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) and the Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP) create virtual circuits on top of datagram networks. Virtual circuits are especially useful in building robust failover mechanisms and allocating bandwidth for delay-sensitive applications.
MPLS and its predecessors, as well as ATM, have been called "fast packet" technologies. MPLS, indeed, has been called "ATM without cells" [1]. Modern routers, however, do not require these technologies to be able to forward variable-length packets at multigigabit speeds.

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Packet switching

Packet switching is a communications paradigm in which packets (discrete blocks of data) are routed between nodes over data links shared with other traffic. In each network node, packets are queued or buffered, resulting in variable delay. This contrasts with the other principal paradigm, circuit switching, which sets up a limited number of constant bit rate and constant delay connections between the nodes for their exclusive use for the duration of the communication. Packet mode or packet oriented communication may be utilized with or without a packet switch or router. Examples of the latter case are point-to-point data links, digital video and audio broadcasting or a shared physical medium, such as a bus network, ring network, or hub network.

Packet mode communication is a statistical multiplexing technique, also known as a dynamic bandwidth allocation method, where a physical communication channel is divided into an arbitrary number of logical variable bit-rate channels or data streams. Each stream is divided into packets that normally are forwarded by a network node asynchronously in a first-come first-serve fashion. Alternatively, the packets may be forwarded according to some scheduling discipline for fair queuing or differentiated and/or guaranteed Quality of service. In case of a shared physical media, the packets may be delivered according to some packet-mode multiple access scheme.

Networks using packet switching can use datagrams or connectionless messages and/or virtual circuit switching (also known as connection oriented). Some connectionless protocols include Ethernet, UDP, IP. Some connection oriented protocols include TCP, Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), X.25 and Frame relay.

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Network Protocols

In networking, the communication language used by computer devices is called the protocol. Yet another way to classify computer networks is by the set of protocols they support. Networks often implement multiple protocols to support specific applications. Popular protocols include TCP/IP, the most common protocol found on the Internet and in home networks.

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