Real-time ethernet solutions supporting ring topology from an avionics perspective: A short survey

Abstract

To cope with the increasing quantity of wires, thus the weight and integration costs in avionics, an implementation of a new avionics communication architecture with less cables will clearly improve the efficiency of aircraft, while reducing the deployment costs. Furthermore, such a communication architecture shall be efficient to meet the design requirements, in terms of predictability and availability, for the least amount of money. Therefore, the AFDX compatibility, a minimized (re)-configuration effort and costs are among the most important issues to guarantee. On the other hand, the recent research effort towards defining new communication solutions, to guarantee a high availability level with limited cabling complexity for realtime applications, has renewed the interest in ring topology. Therefore, the main objective of this paper is benchmarking the most relevant solutions, based on Ethernet technology and supporting ring topology, vs avionics requirements, and we particularly focus on the main Performance Indicators, specified in IEC 61784-2, of each one of them.