High-capacity avionics optical fiber information exchange networks

Abstract

This paper presents the new design concepts to implement advanced high-capacity avionics optical fiber information exchange networks (AOFIE-networks). Very-high-speed medium access protocols are proposed to support multi-gigabit per second data communications, and the considerations on network design are described to match the requirements for aircraft applications. Optical time-division multiple access networks are shown to be very efficient for on-board TV and audio distribution services, while an optical code-division multiple access network is attractive to high-speed asynchronous packet data transfer. Since wavelength-division multiple access (WDMA) has advantages of channel independence and protocol transparence, it makes WDMA networks very suitable for real-time multiservice communications and on-board network interconnection. Furthermore, WDMA-based hybrid medium access protocols are very attractive to future AOFIE-networks, which can increase both network utilization and communication efficiency. >