Spatially Distributed Testing in Avionics: Setup, Experiences and Performance Assessment

Testing of avionics platforms itself and with integrated system functions is a cost driver. Usually the hardware is developed in parallel to the software, which makes the iterative development process more difficult. Since testing of system functions always requires hardware and complex test-benches it is usually conducted quite late in the development process. This paper presents an approach to validate system functions by connecting several parts of a test-bench across the internet resulting in a distributed test-bench. This setup can be used for functional testing and for the preparation of the final system tests before all equipment is shipped into one large test facility. The paper focusses on the setup chosen for interconnection and performance tests that have been carried out to estimate the achievable connection quality with such a setup.