The Research Of Automatic Test Technology On The Fibre Channel Network Equipment

Fibre Channel (FC) network, is network connection formed by conducting tool，in which light containing communication information transmit within the optical fibermade of glass or plastic under the optical total reflection principle. FC Network have theadvantage of wide frequency band, low loss, light in weight, high quality, stableperformance, anti-electromagnetic interference, strong confidentiality and etc. Thus, FCNetwork is not only widely applied in trunk communication, but also making more andmore broad application because of its flexible topology and completely open standard.And meantime, a large number of companies swarming into FC network industry, anddeeper research of FC network by many institutions, the Omni bearing test work of FCnetwork are getting even important. However, due to the problem of often facingmassive un-testing data, tedious test work, high accuracy requirement, and largevolumes of post data processing, the traditional manual testing is in an awkwardsituation that is inefficient, prone to error, and severely affected the project’s overallprogress. Therefore, this paper focus on FC network equipment automated testingresearch, is aimed to achieve a completed automated test platform for FC networkequipment in order to release test controller from tedious test work, the pressure ofenhance high efficient and accuracy requirement, and the difficulty of speed up theproject progress.Thanks to the application of GPIB bussing technique and VS2008softwaredevelopment technique, the automated testing platform in this paper shows two mainadvantages. The first advantage of this platform is to integrate multiple function ofdifferent test equipment into one single computer, by applying VS2008developedsoftware on computer end and testing FC network through GPIB bussing control onmultiple test equipment. Secondly, it is getting more efficient and accuracy by usingmulti-threading technology, so that it is in-time collecting data, displaying data, andgenerating reports.According to meet the FC protocol standards for the FC network equipmentparameters, this paper proposes an automated test specification for what and how physical quantity should be tested. Through a series of detail analyzing of FC protocolcriteria, including FC-PI-2、FC-PH4.3、Fiber Channel Consortium FC-PI-2Clause6Optical Physical Layer Test Suite V1.0etc., it summaries up such as the rate of opticalsignal, the optical signal error rate, spectral test, optical power, and all other measuringphysical quantities, and additionally designs the methods and criteria for testing thesequantities.The series of studies from this paper may have a positive impact on automatic testtechnology in the FC network equipment test, as well as certain significance for theresearch on how to improve the efficiency and reduce the cost of test.