This article presents a complete test equipment for the promising on-board serial high-speed SpaceFibre protocol, published by the European Committee for Space Standardization. SpaceFibre and SpaceWire are standard communication protocols for the latest technology sensor devices intended for on-board satellites and spacecrafts in general, especially for sensors based on image acquisition, such as scanning radiometers or star-tracking devices. The new design aims to provide the enabling tools to the scientific community and the space industry in order to promote the adoption of open standards in space on-board communications for current- and future-generation spacecraft missions. It is the first instrument expressly designed for LabVIEW users, and it offers tools and advanced features for the test and development of new SpaceFibre devices. In addition, it supports the previous SpaceWire standard and cross-communications. Thanks to novel cutting-edge design methods, the system complex architecture can be implemented on natively supported LabVIEW programmable devices. The presented system is highly customizable in terms of interface support and is provided with a companion LabVIEW application and LabVIEW Application Programming Interface (API) for user custom automated test-chains. It offers real-time capabilities and supports data rates up to 6.25 Gbps.The proposed solutions is then fairly compared with other currently available SpaceFibre test equipment. Its comprehensiveness and modularity make it suitable for either on-board device developments or spacecraft system integrations.

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The continuous innovation of satellite payloads is leading to an increasing demand of data-rate for on-board satellite networks. In particular, modern optical detectors generate and need to transfer data at more than 1 Gbps, a speed that cannot be satisfied with standardized technologies such as SpaceWire. To fill this gap, the European Space Agency (ESA) is supporting the development of a new high-speed link standard, SpaceFibre. SpaceFibre provides a data-rate higher than 6.25 Gbps, together with the possibility to use multiple Virtual Channels running over the same physical link, each one configurable with flexible Quality of Service parameters. These features make a SpaceFibre network very appealing but also complex to set up in order to achieve the desired end-to-end requirements. To help this process, a Simulator for HIgh-speed Network (SHINe) based on the open-source toolkit OMNeT++ has been developed and is presented in this paper. It supports the simulation of SpaceFibre and SpaceWire protocols in order to help both the final steps of the standardization process and the system engineers in the setup and test of new networks. SHINe allows to precisely simulate common network metrics, such as latency and bandwidth usage, and it can be connected to real hardware in a Hardware-in-the-Loop configuration.

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