Real-time guarantees on full-duplex switched ethernet for military applications

Abstract

This paper is a proposal for a future method of avionics data communication in military aircrafts. The need for this proposal results from the increasing complexity of avionics systems that is pushing the MIL-STD-1553B well beyond the limits of its bandwidth. Among several high speed interconnection technologies, Full-Duplex Switched Ethernet is an attractive candidate to replace the MIL-STD-1553B for advanced military aircraft system interconnection but, unfortunately, it was not originally developed with the aim to deliver real-time communications. Therefore, we have to add new mechanisms over Switched Ethernet to achieve realtime behaviour with bounded delays. In this paper, we describe the most important existent real-time transfer solutions for the classic Ethernet and discuss their possible applicability over Switched Ethernet. Then, we compare their performances and their capacities to handle realtime constraints required by the military applications. A special care is given to the traffic shaping approach which allows to limit the congestions in the switch and to guarantee low delays. We will show in experiments that with the traffic shaping approach with the priority handling, we can achieve deterministic transmission that respect the military application’s requirements.