A two-stage distributed architecture designed for DAQ of thousands-channel physical experiment

This manuscript presents a two-stage distributed architecture for DAQ of thousands-channel large-area wire sensor network for physical experiment. The architecture can be divided into two units, the upper unit is for the data collection and storage, also including main control, quality monitoring, and data recording, the lower unit is for data sampling and transmission. The most prominent characters of this architecture are real-time capability, high precision synchronous data sampling, and easy scalable. We have built a prototype architecture for 16 cables (one cable containing 1920 channels) with the associated hardware modules, and tested the sampling synchronization, data transmitting and storage ability by using the cable simulator developed by ourselves. Test result shows that the sampling synchronization error between two channels with 100m apart can achieve 1ns. The tested maximum data rate from a cable (1920 channels) is 11.52MB/s, thus the total data rate is 1.47456Gbps for 16 cables (30720 channels).