Certification Considerations of Software-Defined Radio Using Model-Based Development and Automated Testing

In this article, we present a set of methods to accelerate the development process and the verification process of certifiable Software-Defined Radio (SDR) applications, including both Model-Based Development (MBD) methodology and automated testing (unit and integration) technology. We demonstrate the feasibility with a case study, where an Instrument Landing System (ILS) in the domain of SDR avionics applications is presented, in which part of the code (for signal processing) is automatically generated from models and the remaining (for integration) code is not. The proposed methods strive to accelerate the compliance with the DO-178C standard’s dynamic testing requirements. We consider the integration of the proposed methods to a system’s certification processes in the context of the case study. The main contribution of this paper consists of integrating the MBD and the automated testing methods, and mapping them to the certification processes of SDR by respecting the set of instructions specified in the standard DO-178C.