August 7th, 2018

Hot Topic: Measurement Data Capture

It is ironic how we complained about too much rain just last summer (see: blog entry from July 2017) whereas now man and machine are melting away.

Just as outside the air is smoldering, inside our offices, the developers' heads, their keyboards as well as our testing PCs are running equally hot. As with the rest of Germany, thermometers here are currently measuring peak values.

Speaking of "measuring", Kithara RealTime Suite for a long time has been involved in the field of capturing of measurement data for test system development. There is a number of applications, for example, which require large amounts of measurement data to be stored on physical storage mediums in real-time but which also need to access this data within the real-time context. For this, special file formats are often utilized.

The support for one of these file formats, PCAPng, is currently in development at Kithara. PCAPng (Packet Capture New Generation) is a programming interface by Wireshark with which to capture and log network packets. With the implementation of the corresponding PCAPng file format into the Kithara real-time system, it will be possible to log large amounts of such measurement data without packet loss and to analyze them with appropriate algorithms.

PCAPng will be first among the upcoming measurement data formats that will be supported, which is why its release window is hot on our heels—in more than one sense.