Design, implementation and verification of the User Terminal Emulator for the Iris Verification TestBed

Abstract

The present thesis results from an internship inside Thales Alenia Space Italia S.p.A. (TAS-I) located in Rome. Thales Alenia Space is an european leader for satellite systems and is a worldwide reference in telecoms, radar and optical Earth observation, defense and security, navigation and science. TAS-I is the prime contractor of the Phase B of Iris Programme, the ESA project to develop a new satellite communication system for Air Traffic Management; in particular TAS-I is one of the contractors involved in the realization of the Verification TestBed (VTB) for the new Communication Standard (CS). Our activities concerned the functional design of the logical component of the VTB and the software development of the User Terminal Emulator for the VTB itself. Precisely, we implemented a tool in C/C++ languages that emulates the UT resources assignment signalling protocol and the traffic flows management for several aircraft instances. This application supplies TAS-I with a tool, as flexible as possible to adapt to the upcoming CS specifications and useful to resolve several trade-off by means of preliminary tests. Besides, it could be a comparison instrument to evaluate, in terms of software design and implementation, similar emulation frameworks which at the moment do not belong to TAS-I testbed heritage