Design And Implementation Of Sharing Test Server For WDM Equipments

WDM is the basic technology in the backbone transport networks, and it consists of Terminals, Repeaters and OADM nodes in the WDM system. Each branch port of the WDM or OADM except the line port is connected to one transponder card, which is used as the wavelength adapter(also including the function of client data aggregation) of client signal.The quantity ratio of transponder cards and rest cards in WDM system is approximately n(n is the wavelength number). The more number of wavelengths the more closely approached. Therefore the test of transponders occupies the most parts of WDM system test, and the cost of the test equipment for transponder is extremely expensive, which is over 80% in the whole test equipment investment for the WDM system testing. As most of the telecom operators in the world continuously reduce the cost per bit, the system equipment supplier has to try every means to reduce the cost of manufacturing and testing accordingly. The instrument utilization is 20% or lower in the traditional automatic test platform, if we can double it to 40% or higher, the cost of the test instrument will decrease 50% at least.The traditional automatic test platform is local stand-alone mode, which use a PC as the controller, connect all the instruments by cables, and runs the test code to execute the test process. Test cases are executed serially, when a specified case is being tested, the instruments not related are free and keep waiting for their related cases coming. This kind of testing mode has the advantage of simple control, implement and convenient maintain. But it has such disadvantage as low utility that test equipment keeping free in most of test duration.In this thesis, we introduce an automatic sharing test server of WDM equipment, to share the test instruments by multiple users. Different client users only need to submit their test requirements in the client side; test server will calculate the required hardware resources and distribute the current idle resources to client users in the queue, then execute the test cases from different client parallelly, and release the resource immediately after each test case finished then assigned to new users. We can develop automatic test program for client and server respectively according to this structure. The server receives applications from different client users, allocate the resources basing on the preset arbitration algorithm, execute the test cases and send test results to the client; Client maintain their list of test cases, send out the test requests, and handling test data and generate the entire test reports.Over all, the thesis includes the introduction of WDM equipment system and its automatic test platform evolution, automatic sharing test server hardware and software architecture, and a simple server/client implementation. It provides a reference for other colleagues to develop automatic sharing test server.