Data Acquisition and Transfer System for Ship Navigation using IP Network : Implementation on T.S. Fukae-maru

Abstract

T.S. Fukae-maru has 100Mbps FDDI network (Ship's LAN for short). IP network is running on the Ship's LAN. In T.S. Fukae-maru, many kinds of sensor that measures various kinds of data are connected to the Ship's LAN through sequencers. It is possible to get these measured data with IP communication. Using this feature, authors design the server program that receives the data from sequencers periodically, and transfers the data on user request. A client program sends a request to the server program, and displays/processes the data that is received from the server program. These two programs are executed as different processes. The IP protocol is utilized in the communication between both processes. Authors propose that data acquisition/transfer system is composed with such server-client model. The computers require just reguler connection to the network through the interface like Ethernet but any other special connection to the measuring devices. By connecting the computer to the Ship's LAN, users are able to utilize data in various places in T.S. Fukae-maru. In this paper, we describe the method of the system design with server-client model and some cases of its application. As the first step, experiments by prototype system and data display system by graphics are explained.