The Distributed Measurement Systems: A New Challenge for the Metrologists

Abstract

The recent years have witnessed a dramatic improvement in the performances of the analog-to-digital (ADC) and digital-to-analog (DAC) converters, both in terms of resolution, linearity, and conversion speed, and the computing devices dedicated to digital signal processing (DSP). As a consequence, the measuring instruments have evolved toward a virtual instrument (VI) architecture, where the measuring activity is performed by a computer equipped with dedicated conversion peripherals. Since computers can be easily connected to a network of shared resources, the most recent evolution of the measurement systems has involved distributed architectures. These architectures, however, have given rise to a number of new metrological issues, mainly related to their synchronization, that, if not considered, might lead to incorrect results. This chapter is aimed at addressing such problems and their possible solutions.