Available online at www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect

Procedia Engineering 174 ( 2017 ) 820 – 826

13th Global Congress on Manufacturing and Management, GCMM 2016 A Solution for Updating Firmware of Target Simulator through Wireless Network

Tianze Yua,b,*, Lijun Jiangb, Chao Songb

aUniversity of British Columbia, 2332 Main Mall, Vancouver, B.C. V6T 1Z4, Canada bInstitute of Acoustics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, No.21, North Fourth Ring West Road, Beijing 100190, China

Abstract

In this paper, we present an architecture that allows the underwater acoustic target simulator to update the firmware and be controlled through a wireless method. It is a useful and desirable way for research activities allowing researchers to quickly and efficiently perform experiments on active sonar system that would otherwise be costly and time-consuming. This architecture is designed on the embedded operating system DSP/BIOS, realized and evaluated on a self-made TMS320C6455 DSP platform. The scientific experiment aboard the anti-frogman sonar system project has proved its validity and stability. In addition, the presented architecture could be transplanted to any other embedded operating system with a similar demand. This design has filled a real gap of wireless-control underwater target simulator in the market. ©© 20172016 The The Authors. Authors. Published Published by Elsevierby Elsevier Ltd. ThisLtd. is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (Peerhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/-review under responsibility of the organizing). committee of the 13th Global Congress on Manufacturing and Management. Peer-review under responsibility of the organizing committee of the 13th Global Congress on Manufacturing and Management Keywords: wireless; underwater acoustic; target simulator; real-time system.

1. Introduction

The anti-frogman sonar is an active sonar with the main scientific aim of tracking and recognizing underwater small targets around a platform on the sea or near a harbor [1]. As a supporting equipment, the target simulator is used for testing and debugging the functions and parameters including source level, operating range, tracking parameters, etc. of the anti-frogman sonar in the research and development processes [2].

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +1-778-798-5315. E-mail address: [email protected]

1877-7058 © 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer-review under responsibility of the organizing committee of the 13th Global Congress on Manufacturing and Management doi: 10.1016/j.proeng.2017.01.228 Tianze Yu et al. / Procedia Engineering 174 ( 2017 ) 820 – 826 821

Anti-frogman Sonar

Target Simulator-D Target Simulator-A

Target Simulator-B Working Range Target Simulator-C

Fig. 1. The network structure.

The large amount of adjustment of functions and parameters combined with a volatile work environment demand an effective approach to solve the problems of remote operation. This implies that steps like control and firmware update have to be conducted in a wireless method [3]. As shown in Fig. 1, the target simulators are evenly placed in a sea area with a radius of 1 km, and the detecting sonar is placed in the center. Once put in the specific position, the simulators are unreachable to change the firmware for functional improvements, which could occur frequently during an experiment. And it will be both time-consuming and toilsome to change the firmware one by one, especially when the number of the simulators is large. To solve this problem, we design and implement an architecture to update the firmware of the target simulator through a wireless method in this paper. Firstly, we construct the framework based on the embedded operating system and achieve the communication between the sonar and the target simulators. Secondly, flash related processes, specifically the transmission and unpacking of firmware are presented in detail. Next, we demonstrate the structure of the firmware frame and the efforts we make to guarantee the accuracy and security of the data. In the testing phase, this architecture is adopted in our recent anti-frogman sonar experiment. And in the last section, we discuss the proposed technology and suggest possible future work.

2. Architecture

The components of the system and the communication protocols are detailed in this section, following the data flow from the host (display and control terminal) to the clients (the target simulator). The simulator uses a high- performance fixed-point DSP (C6455) for controlling multiple threads, in combination with a Xilinx XC2V1000 FPGA that acts as a peripheral manager. It is remarkable that the system utilizes a 128M Bytes DDRII memory as data buffer for processing and a 32M Bytes flash memory for storing the firmware. In this application, an embedded operating system kernel DSP/BIOS is employed. Together with its associated networking, microprocessor-DSP communications, and driver modules, DSP/BIOS could provide a solid foundation for sophisticated applications [4]. The system could be configured through graphical or scripting tools or dynamically using operating system calls. In addition, DSP/BIOS is highly scalable with multi-threading configurations requiring as few as 1K words to minimize memory footprint. As shown in Fig. 2, we present a four-thread architecture tailored for our real-time application which is optimized for taking advantage from network control. Besides, the system is able to work at a high frequency of 1GHz but low power consumption. The network thread serves as the base thread because all commands and instructions are received, parsed and transmitted to the other three threads by it. Additionally, inter-process communication send