Design of onboard Local Area Networks

Abstract

Modern onboard networks, especially those that implement Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA/IMA2G) concept, contain up to thousands of nodes. Integrated computation environment requires hard data interconnection with various requirements and constraints. Manual design of onboard networks becomes extremely hard and it's impossible to produce optimal or even efficient network structures. The presented research is intended for creation of method and tool for automated design of onboard local area networks. This will be used to assist engineers and designers of onboard complexes. We design networks using the SpaceWire communication standard, but the research can be easily modified to support other onboard network types. We develop an algorithm for an automated network construction, the prototype implementation of the algorithm, a probabilistic assessment of the intermediate results of the constructed network. We tested the technology on selected examples of real onboard networks and carried out the final evaluation of the development results. The developed prototype is able to build onboard local area networks based on user-defined parameters and constraints; it has a clear interface and performs the computation in the foreseeable time.