The Mars Science Laboratory developed the Workstation TestSet (WSTS) is a computer program that enables flight software development on virtual MSL avionics. The WSTS is the non-real-time flight avionics simulator that is designed to be completely software-based and run on a workstation class Linux PC

Canham, Timothy K.

Chang, Johnny T.

Henriquez, David A.

Villaume, Nathaniel

NASA Technical Reports Server

50 NASA Tech Briefs, September 2009
A software package that has been de-
signed to allow authentication for deter-
mining if the rover(s) is/are within a set
of boundaries or a specific area to access
critical geospatial information by using
GPS signal structures as a means to au-
thenticate mobile devices into a network
wirelessly and in real-time. The advantage
lies in that the system only allows those
with designated geospatial boundaries or
areas into the server.
The Geospatial Authentication soft-
ware has two parts — Server and Client.
The server software is a virtual private
network (VPN) developed in Linux op-
erating system using Perl programming
language. The server can be a stand-
alone VPN server or can be combined
with other applications and services.
The client software is a GUI Windows
CE software, or Mobile Graphical Soft-
ware, that allows users to authenticate
into a network. The purpose of the
client software is to pass the needed
satellite information to the server for
authentication.
This work was done by Stacey D. Lyle of
Geospatial Research Innovation Design for
NASA’s Stennis Space Center.
Inquiries concerning rights for its commer-
cial use should be addressed to:
Dr. Stacey D. Lyle, RLPS
Conrad Blucher Insitute of Surveying and Science 
6300 Ocean Drive
Texas A&M University
Corpus Christi, TX 78412
Phone No. : (361) 825-3712 
Fax: (361) 825-5848
E-mail: stacey.lyle@tamucc.edu
Refer to SSC-00282, volume and number
of this NASA Tech Briefs issue, and the
page number.
Geospatial Authentication
Stennis Space Center, Mississippi
Mars Science Laboratory Workstation Test Set
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California
The Mars Science Laboratory devel-
oped the Workstation TestSet (WSTS) is
a computer program that enables flight
software development on virtual MSL
avionics. The WSTS is the non-real-time
flight avionics simulator that is designed
to be completely software-based and run
on a workstation class Linux PC. This
provides flight software developers with
their own virtual avionics testbed and al-
lows device-level and functional software
testing. The WSTS has successfully off-
loaded many flight software develop-
ment activities from the project testbeds.
Flight software developers can now in-
stantiate as many virtual testbeds as
there are available computer resources
and also enables device level fault injec-
tions that are difficult to achieve on real
avionics testbeds.
The WSTS provides peripheral com-
ponent interface (PCI)-card-level simu-
lation of avionics hardware, enabling
testing of all but the lowest layers of the
flight software. The WSTS utilizes
shared-memory and synchronization
provisions of POSIX in a Linux envi-
ronment to provide high-resolution
simulation with synchronization of the
interaction between simulation and the
flight software. 
This program was written by David A.
Henriquez, Timothy K. Canham, Johnny T.
Chang, and Nathaniel J. Villaume of Caltech
for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. 
This software is available for commercial li-
censing. Please contact Karina Edmonds of
the California Institute of Technology at
(626) 395-2322. Refer to NPO-45690.
Computing Bounds on Resource Levels for Flexible Plans
New algorithm entails less computation than previous algorithms.
Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California
A new algorithm efficiently computes
the tightest exact bound on the levels of
resources induced by a flexible activity
plan (see figure). Tightness of bounds is
extremely important for computations
involved in planning because tight
bounds can save potentially exponential
amounts of search (through early back-
tracking and detection of solutions), rel-
ative to looser bounds.
The bound computed by the new algo-
rithm, denoted the resource-level enve-
lope, constitutes the measure of maxi-
mum and minimum consumption of
resources at any time for all fixed-time
schedules in the flexible plan. At each
time, the envelope guarantees that there
are two fixed-time instantiations — one
that produces the minimum level and
one that produces the maximum level.
Therefore, the resource-level envelope is
the tightest possible resource-level bound
for a flexible plan because any tighter
bound would exclude the contribution of
at least one fixed-time schedule. If the re-
source-level envelope can be computed
efficiently, one could substitute looser
bounds that are currently used in the
inner cores of constraint-posting schedul-
ing algorithms, with the potential for
great improvements in performance.
What is needed to reduce the cost of
computation is an algorithm, the meas-
ure of complexity of which is no greater
than a low-degree polynomial in N
(where N is the number of activities). The
new algorithm satisfies this need. In this
algorithm, the computation of resource-
level envelopes is based on a novel combi-
nation of (1) the theory of shortest paths
in the temporal-constraint network for
the flexible plan and (2) the theory of
maximum flows for a flow network de-
rived from the temporal and resource
constraints. The measure of asymptotic
complexity of the algorithm is
O(N·O(maxflow(N)), where O(x) de-
notes an amount of computing time or a
number of arithmetic operations propor-
tional to a number of the order of x and
O(maxflow(N)) is the measure of com-
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Mars Science Laboratory Workstation Test Set

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