Verifying Quality of Service of ARCnet Based ATOMOS Communication System for Integrated Ship Control

As part of the ATOMOS project (Funded by EU, DG VII) a reliable communication system with predictable behaviour has been designed. The selected solution is a network based on redundant ARCnet segments extended with an EN50170 compliant fieldbus based layer on top of an ARCnet SAP (service access point) layer. An important characteristic of the communication system is that the functionality and timing must be verifiable in order to satisfy requirements from classification companies like Lloyds and Norsk Veritas. By including Service Categories, Traffic Descriptors and Quality of Service concepts in the system it is made possible to measure network performance and hereby obtain verifiable methods for traffic planning and network surveillance. This paper describes the design of a simulation system to be used for testing and verifying the communication on a single ARCnet segment throughout the development phase and to verify real-world integration of the communication system and the applications connected to the network.