Simulation-based verification of the MOST NetInterface specification revision 3.0

Design and specification errors are hard to find in the traditional automotive system design flow. Consequently, these errors may be detected very late e.g. in a hardware prototype or even worse in the final product. In order to allow the verification of distributed embedded systems in early design phases, this work proposes a flexible and efficient virtual prototyping approach in order to check the consistency of system specifications. Our virtual prototyping approach has been applied to the Media Oriented Systems Transport (MOST) specification revision 3.0 and verifies the influence of two newly specified algorithms, namely Ring Break Diagnosis and Sudden Signal Off detection, with respect to numerous network configurations. In total we have verified the specification using more than 10⁵ automatically generated network configurations. The overall costs for network modelling and verification compared to cost-expensive error detection and correction at later design phases have been significantly reduced.