On the Implementation of Embedded Communication over Reflectometry-oriented Hardware for Distributed Diagnosis in Complex Wiring Networks

Abstract

In this paper, the first electronic device capable of performing simultaneous Orthogonal Multi-Tone Time Domain Reflectometry (OMTDR) measurements with data fusion is presented. This is possible by executing reliable communication among several OMTDR-based systems. In fact, the main challenge of any developed system is to achieve a zero bit error rate communication with a typical reflectometry hardware without considering complex clock recovery systems and synchronization blocks. To achieve that, the proposed system must to be able to find the minimum interference sampling time in a short delay in order to avoid synchronous issues. This is achieved by performing a novel fast time distributed oversampling technique. Such technique consists of sampling the Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC) and the Digital-to-Analog Converter (DAC) with a frequency offset, achieving $\Omega$ order oversampling in $\Omega+1$ OMTDR signal cycles. The developed demonstrator is capable of ensuring cable diagnosis and reliable communication between several devices connected with aeronautical cables.