An affordable IMA bridge for refreshing deployed avionics systems

Unified Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) still represents a future architecture vision for most deployed avionics Modular Open System Approach (MOSA) based systems. In general these systems, while MOSA based, are being extended by surgical cross subsystem updates rather than receiving a clean state transformational upgrade to a unified IMA. Due to spiral funding, these systems were developed and extended incrementally and have 2-3 generations of processing and software infrastructure components on onboard and multiple processing generations for the same subsystem. Deployed systems have program life cycles that include 5-10 years for development, multiple tech refreshes, and life cycle sustainment for 20+ years. In addition, interface definition and standards of hardware and software components have typically been driven by the mixture of existing and new development items and the MOSA profile standards of the time. Still, these deployed avionics systems are being challenged to address providing new capabilities at affordable cost without disruption of the installed base and while accommodating legacy architecture constraints. Today's deployed avionics solutions have dealt with this problem by estimating the future processing, I/O and software infrastructure requirements for these new capabilities and provisioning growth with EOL opportunities. There is never sufficient funding for a complete refresh as a standalone program. A new set of affordability challenges are driving toward "multicore enabled IMA bridge" solutions with regard to 1.) inserting IMA multicore pooled processing for SWAP and cost reducing by leveraging Moore's Law 2.) adopting hardware agnostic software environments across subsystems to support reduced life cycle support, 3.) flexibility for supporting mixed legacy, Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE™) conformant, Services Oriented Architecture (SOA), and cross platform domain software for improved reuse and cross platform interoperability, and 4.) addressing I/O migration. To jump start options to addressing these challenges for "multicore enabled IMA bridge" solutions, the IT world technologies of Pooled Server Processing, Virtualization, Publish/Subscribe Infrastructure, and I/O Migration can serve as an IMA Bridge for refreshing deployed avionics systems. This paper analyzes a generic avionics system and presents an approach to build this IMA bridge for some simple use cases and presents an IMA "Figure of Merit" that can be used in design trade studies.