Digitized radar information redundancy method and system

• US 8,429,484 B2
• Filed: 04/16/2009
• Issued: 04/23/2013
• Est. Priority Date: 04/16/2009
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Lockheed Martin Corporation (Martin Marietta Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Lockheed Martin Corporation (Martin Marietta Corporation)
• Inventors: Laviolette, Kerry D., Kanyok, James A.
• Primary Examiner(s): Baderman, Scott
• Assistant Examiner(s): Leibovich, Yair
• Application Number:
  US12/425,294
• Publication Number:
  US 20100269007A1
• Time in Patent Office: 1,468 Days
• Field of Search: 714/752
• US Class Current: 714/752
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 1/0052 Realisations of complexity reduction techniques, e.g. pipelining or use of look-up tables
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 1/0057 Block codes H04L1/0061, H04L1/0064 take precedence

Abstract

The present invention relates to a real time radar data transmission system and process for transmitting forward error correctable data to a plurality of parallel communication channels.

Claims

1. A real time radar data transmission system comprising:

a plurality of parallel communication channels, each channel having a plurality of serially associated directional transmission elements and having one or more inputs for receiving forward error correctable data and one or more outputs for transmitting forward error correctable data;

wherein at least one of the plurality of the directional transmission elements receives the forward error correctable data and corrects the data in error; and

transmits the forward error correctable data to a serially associated directional transmission element; and

wherein the data from the last of the plurality of serially associated directional transmission elements provides input to a hardware processor configured to execute instructions to utilize the forward error correctable data in a radar application; and

wherein when an error in the data is detected a first process compares to a threshold the total number of error corrections made or attempted during a transmission of arbitrary length, and if the number of representing error corrections exceeds the threshold said first process generates a signal for resynchronizing transmission of data in real time.

2. The system of claim 1, wherein the data includes data encoded with a set of check characters in accordance with the forward error correctable data, wherein the forward error correctable data is a member of a class of cyclical block codes.

3. The system of claim 1, wherein the data includes data encoded with a set of check bits in accordance with the forward error correctable data, wherein the forward error correctable data is a member of one of the group of:

parity codes, cyclic redundancy checks, single error correcting (SEC), double error detecting (DED), convolutional codes and block codes.

4. The system of claim 1, wherein serially associated directional transmission elements each having one or more inputs for receiving forward error correctable data accumulate the data from the one or more inputs and output accumulated forward error correctable data.

5. The system of claim 1, wherein the directional transmission elements are bi-directional transmission elements.

6. The system of claim 3, wherein the block codes includes one of Hamming codes, Reed-Solomon codes, Reed-Muller codes, Binary Golay codes and Bose-Chaudauri-Hocquenghem Codes.

7. The system of claim 5, wherein the bi-directional transmission elements are configured for recovery of missing data.

8. A radar data transmission process comprising:

transmitting forward error correctable data to a plurality of parallel communication channels, each channel having a plurality of serially associated directional transmission elements having one or more inputs for receiving forward error correctable data;

receiving the forward error correctable data;

correcting the data in error;

transmitting the forward error correctable data to a serially associated directional transmission element;

processing the data from the last of the plurality of serially associated directional transmission elements;

comparing in non-real time a number of error corrections made to the data to a threshold; and

if the number of corrections exceed the threshold then resynchronizing the transmitting of forward error correction data in real time.

9. The process of claim 8, wherein the directional transmission elements provide uni-directional data flow.

10. The process of claim 9, wherein the data is forward correctible data in each directional transmission element.

11. The process of claim 8, wherein the directional transmission elements provide bi-directional data flow.

12. The process of claim 11, wherein the data is forward correctible data in each directional transmission element and provides for recovery of missing data.

13. The process of claim 12, wherein responsive to detection of missing data, a correction schema is invoked to provide replacement data.

14. The process of claim 11, wherein the data is transmitted to a first processor and to a second processor, each processor configured to pass the forward error correctable data to the other processor.

15. The process of claim 14, further including passing the forward error correctable data in the first processor through a switch to the second processor to restore the integrity of the data when a malfunction occurs in one or more transmission channels.

16. The process of claim 13, wherein responsive to detection of missing data, the correction schema provides the replacement data as the original data through a redundant processor.

17. The process of claim 11, wherein data is communicated in real time over transmission media that link at least two independent processing functions.

18. The process of claim 11, wherein data is communicated in real time over transmission media for a specific radar application.

19. The process of claim 11, wherein data is communicated in real time over transmission media to one or more redundant processors for a specific radar application.

20. The process of claim 11, where each bi-directional transmission element collects two related data streams.

21. The process of claim 11, wherein each bi-directional transmission element collects two related data streams and accumulates the data from the data streams before outputting forward error correctable data.