EUROCONTROL Adapts new ASTERIX Front-end: COMSOFT’S SDFEP in Operational Service

EUROCONTROL has launched COMSOFT’s Surveillance Data Front End Processor (SDFEP) at Maastricht’s ATC centre.

Maastricht/Netherlands, March 2010 – February 11th COMSOFT’s new SDFEP - a high-performance communication engine for the exchange of ASTERIX data – was taken into operational service at EUROCONTROL’s ATC centre in Maastricht. The system serves as universal communication front-end for all incoming and outgoing surveillance information, incorporating a firewall with elaborate configuration options to prevent unauthorised access.

The accuracy of today’s surveillance techniques has reached such a high level, that its consequentially increasing number of parameters have produced equally inflated data volumes over the past years. As a result, the demands on bandwidths of the existing networks have experienced a continuous upsurge in terms of throughput and security. To cater for these needs EUROCONTROL introduced this state-of-the-art front-end for reception of all incoming surveillance data in order to complement their previous solution.

COMSOFT’s SDFEP has been designed to dispatch large data amounts with low latency figures and developed to meet System Integrity Level 2 (SIL2) according to IEC 61508. Furthermore it covers software assurance level 3 (SWAL3) making it ideally suited to support any organisation processing ASTERIX data and having to manage the ubiquitous surge in data volumes.