Improvements to Station Beamforming

Work was done in SP-2001 and SP-3416 to increase the VHDL simulations of the station beamformer to test how it handles out of order and dropped packets. This work determined that reordered packets was sufficiently handled - up to 8 out of order packets could be present without error in the station beamformer daisy chain. However, with dropped packets, it was documented that dropping a single packet at one stage in the daisy chain, caused an entire 8 packet burst to be dropped at the next.

Dropped packets should be substituted with the reserved value so the data is flagged. A counter of the number of flagged packets should also be added and reported as part of TPM health monitoring to MCCS.

In addition to this, an issue with the station beamformer affecting stations with more than 4 TPMs has been uncovered. This is detailed in SPRTS-235.

This feature aims to do the following:

• Complete the outstanding work on correctly handling dropped station beam packets
• Diagnose and fix the issue affecting larger station beam chains (SPRTS-235)
• Add a mechanism for dropped station beam packets to be reported to MCCS