A Configurable, Extensible Implementation of Inter-Partition Communication for Integrated Modular Avionics

Aerial vehicles consist of many electronic devices connected through various networks. Thus, we should be able to describe them very clearly and easily to configure network channels. It is also highly desirable to have a framework that allows adding new network devices or protocols to the existing systems while minimizing the effects on the existing software. At the same time, since there are several kinds of network protocols available, an abstraction that supports multiple protocols in a transparent manner are essential to provide the portability of avionics applications. To address these, we extend the XML-based configuration of ARINC 653 so that the description of network devices and protocols can be done very systematically. In addition, we introduce the network manager that provides a transparent abstraction over multiple networks and efficient way of adding a new network protocol without modifications of existing software. We implement our design over Ethernet, Control Area Network (CAN) and POSIX Inter-Process Communication (IPC), and show its performance in terms of communication latency and jitter.