Specifications

AN-50 terminal and the T-58 transceiver. The radios, transceivers and some of the attenuators
are shown in Fig. 3.3
Advanced Acoustic Concepts supplied the PCs that are used to generate and receive traffic. One
terminal was a Compaq Evo N620c laptop with a Pentium M 1.6Ghz processor and 512 MB
RAM and a gigabit Ethernet port. In early testing the other terminal was an IBM ThinkPad
transnote. This machine did not have the resources to support the throughput we needed. It was
subsequently discovered that this terminal was creating a bottleneck in the throughput. Final
testing used a HP PC with a Pentium 4 2.8Ghz processor and 248 MB RAM and a 100 Mbps
Ethernet adaptor.
3.4 Software Selection: To able to test the various different configurations and RF environments
that we can create with the RF portion of the test bed we need tools that allow us to both generate
traffic as we desire and be able to log the observed performance. MSU has procured and
installed Omnicor’s “IP Traffic Test & Measure” software suite. This software can generate up
to sixteen simultaneous traffic streams. The parameters (e.g., packet size, priority, inter-packet
delay time, packets per second, etc.) of each stream can easily be set by the GUI on a per
connection basis. A screen shot of the parameters interface is shown below in Figure 3.4. The
receiving computer measures round trip delay, lost packets, bit error rate and throughput. The
software collects, stores, analyzes and graphs the data.
Fig 3.3 Redline AN-50s on the lab bench. 4 T-58 transceivers (left) and 4 AN-50 radio terminals (right) are shown
on the lab bench. Fixed attenuators are connected directly to two of the terminals.
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