MilCAN Conformance Testbed

The MilCAN Conformance Testbed has been developed by the VRC in conjunction with the MilCAN Working Group (MWG) to conduct conformance testing of MilCAN-A enabled devices. It is being supported by the MWG and the UK MOD as MilCAN is one of the prime VSI standards.

Conformance testing of MilCAN devices is highly recommended at the early stages of the development cycle to ensure miss-interpretations of the specifications and development errors are detected and corrected as soon as possible. Due to the distributed operation of a MilCAN network, individual node errors could cause system-wide faults that are hard to detect the source. This usually happens during integration time that can be well in the programme schedule with the risk of causing delays until the problems are corrected. The purpose of this facility is to de-risk this situation.

A MilCAN enabled device is certified only at the network level and not at the user application, sub-system, or integrated system engineering levels. These are currently considered to be within the responsibility of the customer.

Testing environment

The in-house testing environment consists of a number of test equipment to execute real-time test procedures and monitoring, embedded nodes to generate custom traffic profiles, and also COTS reference equipment for independent monitoring of the network.

Typical certification procedure requires the customer to provide the Device Under Test's (DUT) hardware and software along with documentation defining its MilCAN configuration. This does not have to include any application information but only data configuration. For example, the message set will have to be provided in raw data form without the need to define the meaning of the IDs or the contents of the payload. This is to ensure the confidentiality of the application.

The DUT is subjected to a number of monitoring and interactive tests that have been specifically designed to evaluate the MilCAN operation. After further post-processing of the results a report is produced with the requirements' pass/fail list along with any warnings and detailed error reports.

For conformance testing of commercially sensitive or classified devices it is possible to conduct the testing in the customer's facility using mobile equipment.

Personnel involved with conformance testing holds UK Secret clearance.

Further information on the certification test can be found in the MWG-MILA-003 document.

For further information regarding conformance testing please contact us directly.