SBIR-STTR Award

Software Defined Radio Automated Testing Solution
Award last edited on: 8/18/2021

Sponsored Program
SBIR
Awarding Agency
DOD : Army
Total Award Amount
$794,006
Award Phase
2
Solicitation Topic Code
A19-127
Principal Investigator
Jakub Moskal

Company Information

VIStology Inc (AKA: Versatile Information Systems Inc, Vistology Inc)

5 Mountainview Drive
Framingham, MA 01701
   (508) 788-5088
   vis@vistology.com
   www.vistology.com
Location: Multiple
Congr. District: 05
County: Middlesex

Phase I

Contract Number: W15P7T-20-C-0001
Start Date: 10/30/2019    Completed: 3/18/2021
Phase I year
2020
Phase I Amount
$167,348
The Software Communications Architecture (SCA) standard, published by the Joint Tactical Networking Center (JTNC), defines a set of rules and behaviors for the core management, deployment, configuration, and control of applications on an embedded system platform, enabling programmable hardware to run applications and be networked into an integrated system. The SCA has been structured to facilitate ‘portability’ of applications software between different SCA-compliant platforms and ‘interoperability’ provided by the Applications Programming Interfaces (APIs). In order to determine if an application is compliant with the SCA, it must be verified by a set of verification procedures, using one or more of the following methods: inspection, analysis, demonstration, testing. The verification is a costly process. The objective of this project is to develop a platform for testing and analysis of waveforms with respect to the SCA 4.1 with the overall goal of providing means for increased automation of the test procedures, and thus reducing the cost and time of verification. The Phase I prototype will provide an extensible environment for the construction, organization, execution, and summary of automated, reproducible compliance tests on waveform products and will be integrable with the JTEL test platform. The deliverables will also include testing results and documentation.

Phase II

Contract Number: W15P7T-21-C-0008
Start Date: 9/30/2020    Completed: 3/18/2022
Phase II year
2020
Phase II Amount
$626,658
The product of this project – SCA-pass - will be an automated test platform for Tactical Communications Waveforms and Applications against the SCA v4.1 specification. It will be implemented as a modular, object-oriented architecture that allows separation of test description from the test execution implemented in Java and able to execute on both Windows and Linux platforms. SCA-Pass will be able to read in test requests in XML, analyze requests, generate and run testing scripts, invoke the particular waveform components on a tactical radio via either USB cable and/or Ethernet, analyze testing results, accept user inputs and provide testing results in a number of common formats (XML, CSV, HTML and ASCII text). SCA-Pass will be integrated with the SCAv4.1 Test Suite (STS) that is developed by the JTNC Test and Evaluation Laboratory. Additionally, SCA-Pass will be used as an independent component that will be easy to integrate with the testing tools used by commercial developers of SCA compliant applications. Due to its utilization of the semantic technologies, SCA-Pass, will be easy to adapt to the variability of the SCA requirements that may be expected in the near future, e.g., moving from SCAv4.1 to SCAv5, or even to the modifications of the requirements to include other standard architectures, e.g., FACE.