Software-to-hardware tester for SpaceWire oriented transport protocols: SpaceWire networks and protocols, long paper

Compliance or conformance testing is basically a kind of an audit which is performed for the system to check whether all the specified standards are met or not. Implementation of conformance testers for the communication protocols is an important task, which is being solved in the majority of industrial companies that develop the communication equipment. On-board equipment always needs a proper testing before the integration into a spacecraft. Especially if we talk about equipment, that operates according to the newly developed communication protocol. Conformance testing is such kind of testing, which gives an ability to ensure that a hardware or software product, system or a physical link complies with the requirements of a specification or any other document. There is a number of transport protocols intended to operate over SpaceWire. The newly developed transport protocol STP-ISS is now among these protocols and provides such services as reliability, guaranteed data delivery, scheduling and connection-oriented data transmission. In order to test the software models or hardware implementation of the STP-ISS protocol the authors created a so-called software-to-hardware tester. It gives ability to test the real on-board hardware with the software implementation of a protocol model. The evolution of a tester can provide opportunities for testing other SpaceWire oriented transport protocols such as RMAP, CCSDS PTP, SpaceWire-R, etc. The current paper gives an overview of conformance testers, describes main features of the STP-ISS protocol, and, finally deals with the implementation of the Software-to-Hardware STP-ISS tester and its application use cases.