Customer:  Ericsson Componedex

Ericsson Componedex specialises in the supply of communications systems for use with satellite, terrestrial and wireless based carriers.

Requirement

Ericsson Componedex design, install and maintain high availability satellite data networks. The earth station equipment at the network hub or at critical nodes is often made dual redundant with automatic switching between live and standby systems in the event of any failure to ensure a high overall system availability.

Ericsson required the ability to remotely monitor earth station equipment performance from their offices or out of hours by engineering staff from their homes. This would enable a speedy identification and subsequent replacement of faulty equipment. A further requirement was the ability to remotely control the uplink site equipment configuration to assist with fault diagnosis or to take suspected faulty equipment out of service etc.

PicoServ Solution

The PicoServ miniature web server module together with the PicoServ digital I/O module was chosen due to its low cost and flexible configuration options.

A typical earth station uplink facility consists of two sets (live and standby) of satellite modem, up-converter and high power amplifier plus a waveguide switch for connecting either the live or standby equipment sets to the satellite antenna.

Each piece of equipment at the uplink site provides a fault summary alarm output which is connected to an input on the digital I/O card. This enables the fault status of each unit to be displayed in the browser. In addition one of the digital I/O module outputs is used to provide remote manual control of the waveguide switch. The PicoServ web server module is connected to the Internet via the local LAN allowing Ericsson engineering staff to access the site from office or home.

The system configuration is illustrated in the diagram below.

Construction of the user interface HTML page was straightforward. Each unit at the uplink site is displayed as an image, with a clear unit status shown below. The OK or FAULT status is displayed according to the state of the alarm input at the digital I/O module.
Manual control of the live equipment is via two chain select buttons. A hyperlink assigned to each button selects the appropriate state of an output on the digital I/O module which controls the state of the waveguide switch.

The browser window used to monitor and control the uplink site is shown below.