ARINC 664 - the future of networked Avionics?
Most new commercial, and several military aircraft have now adopted AFDX, officially known as ARINC 664, Part 7, as a backbone network for their avionics systems.
Requirements of ARINC 664
An ARINC 664 system is essentially a 100-BASE-T switched network where the protocol layers (Ethernet, IP, and UDP) are modified to provide unique addressing and data management for the various avionics computers. The fail-safe of the network is a unique switch that polices the network traffic to ensure that no computer or subsystem of a computer violates preassigned bandwidth allocations. On an actual aircraft system, the ARINC 664 switch is critical to ensure that any particular avionics computer, or Line Replaceable Unit (LRU), does not start to babble on the network and disrupt the critical timing of avionics data packets.
One of the problems with adopting this means of networking is the inadequacy of the present day Network Interface Card. Standard NICs are not required to provide high-resolution time stamp in nanoseconds and high-resolution packet transmission. Avionics systems require near 100 percent data transmission accuracy at precise, regular frequencies, whereas office and communication systems are relatively much less demanding and their PCs and Windows or Linux operating systems do not build to these higher-end requirements. Consequently, the ideal PC-based ARINC 664 analysis tool must overcome the Ethernet processing shortcomings while utilizing a high enough processing capability to fulfill avionics engineers’ demanding requirements, while still retaining PC pricing.
Most new commercial, and several military aircraft have now adopted AFDX, officially known as ARINC 664, Part 7, as a backbone network for their avionics systems.
Requirements of ARINC 664
An ARINC 664 system is essentially a 100-BASE-T switched network where the protocol layers (Ethernet, IP, and UDP) are modified to provide unique addressing and data management for the various avionics computers. The fail-safe of the network is a unique switch that polices the network traffic to ensure that no computer or subsystem of a computer violates preassigned bandwidth allocations. On an actual aircraft system, the ARINC 664 switch is critical to ensure that any particular avionics computer, or Line Replaceable Unit (LRU), does not start to babble on the network and disrupt the critical timing of avionics data packets.
One of the problems with adopting this means of networking is the inadequacy of the present day Network Interface Card. Standard NICs are not required to provide high-resolution time stamp in nanoseconds and high-resolution packet transmission. Avionics systems require near 100 percent data transmission accuracy at precise, regular frequencies, whereas office and communication systems are relatively much less demanding and their PCs and Windows or Linux operating systems do not build to these higher-end requirements. Consequently, the ideal PC-based ARINC 664 analysis tool must overcome the Ethernet processing shortcomings while utilizing a high enough processing capability to fulfill avionics engineers’ demanding requirements, while still retaining PC pricing.
posted by Ramesh at
2:13 AM
|
0 comments
