Prototype Service Oriented Architecture Based Remote Experimentation for High Power RF System at 3.7 GHz

Abstract

Lower Hybrid current Drive system (LHCD) is a vital system in Steady State Super Conducting Tokamak -1 (SST-1). It would be used for non inductive current drive and heating Experiments. LHCD System houses 4 klystron based high power RF system at 3.7 GHz. Each High power RF system operation is supplemented by the boot up and control of auxiliary power supplies and microwave system. For the long term research objective and collaboration with international/national group, it is desirable to setup a mechanism for the online remote experimentation and data sharing across the web. The distributed and heterogeneous instrumentation and control propose the need of application integration. The recent development in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web Services promises a great deal in solving similar issues. Hence, a SOA based remote experimentation system has been indigenously designed, developed and tested. The data archival and visualization software has been developed in the MDS+ data acquisition system which is widely used in tokamak research and development community. The performance issues were considered to be of importance and a set of studies has been carried out. The experiments with Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) messages have been made in a Web Service Environment to find out the performance in response time using SOAP. The naive and direct use of SOAP resulted in higher response time but with the improvements and an intelligent choice of eXtended Markup Language (XML) parser, the response time for SOAP messaging have been improved drastically. The functional prototype of the implementation has been tested with the VersaModule Eurocard (VME) based Data Acquisition and Control Setup at LHCD Lab. Finally, this product will be a part of SST-1 LHCD system data acquisition and control activities.