Applying Virtual Environment Testing to the Air Traffic Control Environment of 2015

摘要

The operational environment for communication systems is becoming increasingly complex with the rapid growth and expansion of military, civil, and commercial wireless technology. This will especially be true in the air traffic control environment of the future. In this arena combination of voice, navigation, surveillance and data link signals will be required as the National Airspace System is expanded and modernized. Many of these radios will be software defined and upgradeable without significant hardware modifications. Testing of these complex systems historically required multiple levels of testing from the most basic separable components to subsystem testing in which related groups of these components are combined and verified and finally system level testing in which the entire complex system is verified. As testing progresses from one level to the next, complexity increases non-linearly until, at the system level, it can become prohibitively expensive to test the system's reactions to real world radio frequency environments. In an effort to correct many of the key software issues within these newly developed radios, testing in a virtual environment will reduce the cost and risk of fielding these modern systems by allowing the systems under test to be subjected to a real world Radio Frequency (RF) environment prior to expensive flight testing and verification. In this environment the system under test can be tested in a virtual flight test environment where RF signals are altered for flight dynamics, terrain and atmospheric conditions. Additionally, these systems can be tested in RF environments representing the complex co-site and jamming environment caused by other communication systems, radio stations, television stations, cell phones and satellite communications.