Impacts of faults on a SpaceWire network

SpaceWire is a standard for a communication interface in a satellite. It reduces a wiring cost for building a network. However, it becomes the complicated topology when we design the network architecture that considered Peer to Peer, a redundancy, etc. Furthermore, a component can share a line with the other components. Therefore, traffics generated by a component will effect to the other traffics. It is difficult to estimate traffics on a network. Additionally, estimating impacts on SpaceWire network by errors related to internal registers and buffers are difficult because SpaceWire has more complex protocol than that of the other communication interfaces such as MIL-STD-1553b. We developed a simulator based on NS-3 to simulate VHDL models with virtual network. We divide a SpaceWire network into function blocks (internal registers, buffers, communication lines etc), and evaluate impacts on each function block by faults. In this paper, we describe simulation results and propose necessary quality of each function block for fault tolerance system with SpaceWire.