Fibre Channel Testing for Avionics Applications
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FIBRE CHANNEL TESTING FOR AVIONICS APPLICATIONS Item Type text; Proceedings Authors Warden, Gary; Fleissner, Bill Publisher International Foundation for Telemetering Journal International Telemetering Conference Proceedings Rights Copyright © International Foundation for Telemetering Download date 23/09/2021 09:45:36 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/605804 FIBRE CHANNEL TESTING FOR AVIONICS APPLICATIONS Gary Warden Bill Fleissner AIM-USA AIM-USA 2252 Bandit Trail 600 W Riechmuth Rd Beavercreek, Ohio Valley, NE 68064 45434 (866) 246-1553 (937) 427-1280 Abstract - Fibre Channel is being implemented speed serial transmissions placed in routed as an avionics communication architecture for switched architectures. a variety of new military aircraft and upgrades to existing aircraft. The Fibre Channel You will see that this “shared characteristic” standard (see T11 web site www.t11.org) places two important stress points on incumbent defines various network topologies and testing methodologies and strategies. First, the multiple data protocols. Some of the shear volume of the data makes it impossible to topologies and protocols (ASM, 1553, RDMA) hold onto a philosophy of logging all data on the are suited for Avionics applications, where the network so as to not miss something of movement of data between devices must take importance for post-run or post-flight analysis. place in a deterministic fashion and needs to And secondly, in a switched topology there is no be delivered very reliably. All aircraft flight single tap point in the system where all the data hardware needs to be tested to be sure that it may be seen. Perhaps as important is the fact will communicate information properly in the that, since shared media transports have been Fibre Channel network. The airframe abandoned for the increased system bandwidth manufacture needs to test the integrated offered by switched networks, there is no single network to verify that all flight hardware is link that can possibly contain all the network communicating properly. Continuous traffic. maintenance testing is required to insure that all communication is deterministic and Although relatively new to the avionics reliable. This paper provides an overview of a marketplace, Fibre Channel is already a High Fibre Channel Avionics network and protocols Speed Digital Data Bus for Avionics. For being used for Avionics. The paper also instance, it is already being implemented on major discusses a practical implementation of programs like the F35/JSF, F18, F16, E2C, B1B avionics level testing and testing challenges and others. Although Fibre Channel is largely not associated with these applications. understood, it must fulfill the mil-avionics market requirements for speed, reliability, determinism, INTRODUCTION and fault tolerance. Speed, reliability, and determinism issues are relatively easy to address. New advanced avionics programs and However, fault tolerance turns out to be applications have an increasing need for dependent on a combination of architectural bandwidth while maintaining the traditional values issues and Upper Level Protocol (ULP), and Fibre of low latency, determinism, and reliability as Channel transport characteristics. hallmarks of mil-avionics requirements. During the past decade Fibre Channel has emerged as a FIBRE CHANNEL BASICS winning solution from several competing technologies such as Scalable Coherent Interface What is Fibre Channel? A very high view of Fibre (SCI) and Gigabit Ethernet. One characteristic Channel shows it is an accepted international that all the competing technologies shared with standard. Within the American National Fibre Channel is that they were all based on high- Standards Institute (ANSI) body is a group called the international Committee for Information Fibre Channel is described in the standards as a Technology Standards (INCITS) that is home to a stack of architectural levels. Although the stack task group called T11. Defining Fibre Channel is pictured in Figure 1 illustrates 7 levels, I will only the responsibility of the T11 task group briefly mention four of them here. committee. Sister sub-committees to T11 would be HIPPI and FDDI as well as T10’s work with Figure 1 SCSI. Architectural Levels – Simple Node This means that Fibre Channel is a Commercial- Application - Device Drivers, Operating System Per Node ULP Off-the-Shelf (COTS) technology enjoying all the benefits of a three to five billion dollar commercial FC-4 Adaptation between OS and Fibre Channel marketplace defined as the Storage Area Network FC-3 Special Services (SAN) market. Although mil-avionics requires FC-2 Exchange, Sequence, Frame Management special environmental packaging and support for Classes of Service, Flow Control Per Port deployed architectures greatly exceeds the FC-AL Loop Management per port eighteen months of the commercial marketplace, FC-1 Encode/Decode Bytes there are great benefits derived from a marketplace which tests, deploys and supports FC-0 Media, Transceivers and Connectors the basic technology. Even in the commercial marketplace, deployed Fibre Channel systems more closely match mil-avionics systems because FC-0, the bottom level, describes the Physical the commercial world greatly values the integrity Interface for Fibre Channel. This level specifically of their core corporate data files and reliable defines the speeds, transceivers, connectors, and access with ultra-high availability. Witness the cabling. Currently there are three baud rates Wall Street and banking industries requirements shipping in commercial and military avionics Fibre for 99.999% availability or uptime and 100% Channel products. These are 1.0625 gigabaud, reliability of data. The billions invested annually 2.125 gigabaud, and 4.25 gigabaud. These rates into this commercial marketplace accrue directly translate to duplex user data rates of 200 to the mil-avionics market. Megabytes per second, 400 Megabytes per second, and 800 Megabytes per second Fibre Channel has been designed to be a respectively. communication protocol between host processors Although the technology is called “Fibre Channel” and secondary storage elements like disk drives the physical media variants include copper along and tape drives. This means that Fibre Channel with long-wave and short-wave optics utilizing has been designed with all the real-time both single mode and multimode cabling. Fibre requirements of speed and reliability that is Channel systems are flexible enough that every characteristic of the Input-Output (I/O) market and physical link may be chosen based on that link’s shared with the mil-avionics market. Additionally, requirements and not on the presence of other Fibre Channel has been designed with the media types elsewhere in the system. concepts of connectivity and interoperability that mark the general networking marketplace. The FC-2 level is interesting because it describes Finally, Fibre Channel has been designed to be a how Fibre Channel manages the flow of universal carrier of information. The result is that information between two ports. This level was Fibre Channel has been crafted to easily map designed by the Standards body to allow ease of other protocols. The idea was to allow existing mapping to Upper Level Protocols (ULP) through software written for legacy protocols to be easily an intermediate mapping level (FC-4). ported to Fibre Channel. In fact, Fibre Channel Fibre Channel supports three pure topologies, does not have a native “command set” of its own. illustrated in Figure 2, and one hybrid. Fibre For an application to utilize the Fibre Channel Channel supports the Point-to-Point, Arbitrated physical and logical transport layers, someone Loop, and Fabric Switched topologies. The hybrid must map an existing command set to it, like SCSI topology supported is Arbitrated Loops attached or 1553, or invent one of their own like the to Switch ports. Take note, in all topologies a Anonymous Subscriber Messaging Protocol Fibre Channel port’s transmitter is only ever (ASM) utilized on some advanced avionics physically attached to one other port’s receiver. programs. This simplification of the link allows for highly- reliable transmissions lowering the system error sending data to a completely different destination rate in even ultra-high-speed links to acceptably port. low rates. To the attached Fibre Channel ports called Figure 2 N_Ports for Node-Ports, the switched fabric looks like a cloud (see Figure 4) that takes care of all Fibre Channel Basic Topologies destination routing. The N_Port is uninvolved in the process of routing and really has no idea of • Point-to-Point – Exactly two N_Ports connected together the physical destination since packets of data, – No Switch (routing function) present • Arbitrated Loop topology called frames, are routed based on a network – Low cost attachment of 1-126 ports assigned address. – Two NL_Ports is a practical minimum – Switch (routing function) distributed into each NL_Port Figure 4 – Special Environments and attach to a Switch – Polling still possible without Well-Known services • Switch topology Fabric Cloud – Up to 14 million ports connected together N_Port – 2 million reserved for special functions Switch N_Port – Generic centralized switch (routing) N_Port environment F_Port – Well-Known Services usually required F_Port F_Port F_Port FABRIC N_Port N_Port F_Port A simple solution for higher availability and F_Port F_Port F_Port greater fault tolerance utilizing any of these F_Port F_Port topologies