Verifying fibre channel FC-AV ULP functionality in a UUT

As electronic warfare becomes more advanced, many obsolete military avionics components are being replaced with more modern components that rely on high speed busses to communicate. Among the protocols running on these high speed busses is the Fiber Channel FC-AV Upper Level Protocol. This protocol provides a means of streaming large volumes of audio and video data at high speeds over a Fiber Channel link. Due to the mission critical nature of many of these systems, maintaining system readiness through verifying these FC-AV components is vital to achieving the systems overall purpose. This paper describes a test solution for the Fiber Channel FC-AV upper level protocol implemented on a fully integrated PXI Express subsystem. This solution allows a test developer to create a test program using an application library, and execute the test on the subsystem's computer and test instrument's realtime processor. In the paper, use of the FC-AV test application library is discussed as a means of verifying the functionality of a component transmitting or receiving data over the FC-AV ULP. Particular attention is given to verification of key aspects of FC-AV traffic such as the video image data, metadata, and image refresh frequency. Methods of configuring the instruments in the subsystem to match the behavior of the unit under test through modification of the network environment at the FC-2 layer and a custom FC-AV image format are also described. Finally design tradeoffs and performance requirements considered during the development of the test solution are discussed.