Buses and Networks for Contemporary Avionics 2007-01-3801

MIL-STD-1553 has served the needs of military system integrators for over 30 years, particularly in the area of command and control applications. Nevertheless, contemporary applications such as high-speed digitized sensors, file transfers, processor clusters, and displays require much higher data rates than 1553's 1 Mb/s. For some environments, particularly for legacy aircraft, the optimal solution is to transmit faster data rates over existing 1553 buses. However, there are other applications that can accommodate and benefit by the deployment of gigabit or multi-gigabit copper or optical switched fabric networks. In addition to MIL-STD-1553, this paper presents and comments about several avionics networking technologies including High-Speed 1553, Fibre Channel, Gigabit Ethernet, and ARINC 664, a form of profiled Ethernet.