The number of space missions has seen continuous growth in the last years. Accordingly, satellite communications traffic and onboard spacecraft technologies have also increased. To manage high data flows in high-bandwidth communication protocols the European Cooperation for Space Standardization has released the SpaceFibre protocol in 2019, whose features for data handling and the introduction of routing capabilities increase the complexity of the infrastructures in such networks. Consequently, a crucial implementation step towards the realisation of a satellite high speed data-handling network is the design and the verification of a routing switch at different levels. As far as the network layer is concerned, the literature and the market lack verification environments for this type of devices. This work proposes a reusable and customisable network-level verification environment for SpaceFibre routing switches, that leverages the capabilities of SystemVerilog and the Universal Verification Methodology standard. In particular, the environ-ment can be connected with any network topology, verifying any router individually. Furthermore, our environment requires network-level compatibility with the hardware interfaces, being independent from the implemented data-layer.
Keywords: SpaceFibre Router; Network-Layer Verification; Universal Verification Methodology (UVM); SystemVerilog.
