Mitigate risks around robustness of Mid.CBF-SDP interface under packet loss.

Investigate and prototype solutions to improve the robustness of the transfer of visibilities into the ingest pipeline under UDP packet drop conditions. 

It has been identified in previous prototyping of the SPEAD protocol that at high transfer rates the network stack loses packets somewhere. A lost SPEAD packet leaves the heap incomplete, or undescribed. This in turn causes the entire heap to be dropped.

TCP has been suggested as a solution, however the round trip time and high bandwidth of the links requires too large of a re-transmission buffer to be viable in an FPGA.

This feature will extend this testing and work done for SP-115 to:

• identify the reasons for packet loss, and 
• develop strategies to minimize 
• 1) the packet loss, 
• 2) the effect of packet loss.

This is a multi-disciplinary problem and suggest it continue to be tackled through cooperation between the CIPA and NZAPP teams.