Remote Control of an Embedded Environment using Target Communication Framework Protocol

The proposed paper gives details on the design, development, and implementation of remote control for an embedded environment using the Target Communication Framework (TCF) protocol. It's an extensible network protocol for communicating with embedded targets. The embedded target is a combination of the actual hardware to be tested together with the test environment. The targets are executed on different operating systems or bare metal, as TCF ensures compatibility with different platforms. The TCF services may exist on the target or the host, as required by the system providing an excellent client-server mechanism. To support the client-server interactions, remote communication with the targets through the network may be preferable. TCF protocol makes the communication with the target easy as it supports a vendor-independent communication framework allowing to discover, add or remove services. It does not depend on any specific transport protocol like TCP/IP, Serial Line, SSH tunnel, etc. and provides transport independent multiplexing. An important feature of TCF is Auto-discovery and single connection setup of all target services. It also allows to transparently add 3rd party value-adding services. Implementation of programming service using TCF protocol for Intelligent Network Interface Controller (INIC), is described in this paper. INIC Programming Library (IPL) is a platform-independent programming library and is used to program the INIC from an application using I2C interface. INICs are INICnet™ transceivers whose primary purpose is to transmit/receive data on a INICnet Network.