A5.3 - Toward Virtualized Flight Test Telemetry Architectures in the Era of Digital IF
- Event
- ETTC 2026 - European Test and Telemetry Conference
2026-06-09 - 2026-06-11
Nuremberg - Chapter
- RF Spectrum II
- Author(s)
- O. A. S. Ali - Safran Data Systems, Les Ulis (France)
- Pages
- 89 - 93
- DOI
- 10.5162/ettc2026/A5.3
- Price
- free
Abstract
Flight test telemetry infrastructures are geographically distributed and support multi-station tracking of airborne platforms. However, baseband processing functions remain physically deployed at each site. The number of parallel telemetry channels and supported modulation schemes is therefore constrained by locally installed hardware. This paper argues that virtualization is the natural evolution of such architectures. Virtualization abstracts these processing functions into software-defined chains running on shared compute platforms. This abstraction relies on digitizing the received signal after RF downconversion to intermediate frequency. Once converted to digital IF and transported over a network, signal acquisition is decoupled from signal processing, which no longer needs to reside at the antenna site. Standardized digital IF transport protocols such as VITA-49 (VRT), the Digital IF Interoperability (DIFI) profile, and IRIG 10⁶ Chapter 10 over UDP already enable network-native streaming of digitized signals. In parallel, the growing adoption of electronically steered antennas that provide early digital outputs further accelerates this architectural transition by bringing digitization closer to the RF front-end. With digital IF transport, processing chains can be instantiated, replicated, or reconfigured dynamically across shared compute resources. Channel count, supported bandwidth, and aggregate decoding throughput can scale with available processing capacity rather than fixed hardware deployments. As flight test instrumentation becomes increasingly digital, virtualization provides a coherent and scalable framework for telemetry signal processing.