Optical LAN for avionics platforms

High-speed optical LAN is the obvious choice to meet the ever increasing bandwidth needs on avionics platforms and reducing size, weight, power, and cost (SWAP + cost). Fiber supports both digital and RF signals and a wide range of protocols. The deterministic, high-integrity Avionics Full Duplex Switched Ethernet (AFDX), which supports 10/100 Mb/s in star configurations, has the potential to replace ARINC 429, IEEE 1394, and US MIL-STD-1553B. Ethernet offers significant cost advantages, flexible provisioning and rapid service reconfiguration, automatic equipment self-identification, remote management and software upgrades, simplified network management, and software-activated VLANs. Most deployed avionics optical systems are point-to-point (p-p) 850-nm multimode fiber (MMF) links. A great deal of work remains to be done to engineer reliable, flexible, and modular optical systems to function across a demanding range of harsh operating environmental conditions. Here, we discuss technologies that address some of these.