Simultaneous Functionality Verification System of Multiple Set-Top Boxes

Set-Top Box device functionalities have been advancing fast during the last decade. This has been mainly triggered by appearance of new multimedia services and applications. Given the high complexity of the STB and large amount of services to be supported, the STB functional verification has become highly challenging task, from both the testing time and testing reliability perspective. High competitiveness and the need to reduce time-to-market make efficient automatic STB testing absolutely necessary. Although automatic testing is considered superior to the manual testing, in general it is difficult to design it for different real case scenarios, and especially in case the input multimedia signal is unknown (live video stream). Another problem is that optimally multiple STB should be tested simultaneously in order to reduce the testing time, in cases when detailed stress testing is required. In order to address these issues, in this paper we propose a new solution and system (with hardware and software modules) for automatic simultaneous functional verification system of multiple Set-Top Boxes based on Black Box Testing (BBT). In the proposed testing system one STB serves as the referent one (for the rest of the STBs under test) with a priory known "faultless" functionality. This enables the STB functional testing with unknown input signal (during live video stream), because the output of the referent STB will serve as the expected output given the same unknown input signal. This is considered as the main contribution of the proposed testing approach along with the acceleration of the STB functional verification process which ensures reduction of time and costs that is considered to be crucial in STB production. The experimental results show high testing accuracy, robustness and efficiency in case of live broadcast video (DVB-S).