A Reality-Conforming Approach for QoS Performance Analysis of AFDX in Cyber-Physical Avionics Systems

Abstract

AFDX (Avionics Full Duplex Switched Ethernet) is developed to support mission-critical communications while providing deterministic Quality of Service (QoS) across cyber-physical avionics systems. Currently, AFDX utilizes FP/FIFO QoS mechanisms to guarantee its real-time performance. To analyze the real-time performance of avionic systems in their design processes, existing work analyzes the deterministic delay bound of AFDX using NC (Network Calculus). However, existing analytical work is based on an unrealistic assumption leading to assumed worst cases that may not be achievable in reality. In this paper, we present a family of algorithms that can search for realistic worst-case delay scenarios in both preemptive and non-preemptive situations. Then we integrate the proposed algorithms with NC and apply our approach to analyzing tandem AFDX networks. Our reality-conforming approach yields tighter delay bound estimations than the state of the art. When there are 100 virtual links in AFDX networks, our method can provide delay bounds more than 25% tighter than those calculated by the state of the art in our evaluation. Moreover, when using our reality-conforming method in the design process, it leads to 27.2% increase in the number of virtual links accommodated by the network in the tandem scenario.