Analysis and architecture design of Time-Triggered avionics WDM network

Avionics is an advanced and integrated system that has strong requirement of flexibility, high bandwidth, and stringent end-to-end latency. Among the proposed architecture, Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) network is featured by almost unlimited bandwidth potential and the potential for a unified network with protocol independence which makes it a good choice for avionics systems. A proper design of routing or traffic grooming may be able to guarantee the real-time demand of communication tasks. However, time-critical messages cannot be totally deterministic. The time-triggered mechanism provides a solution to assure the temporal determinacy of the time-critical message in avionics WDM network. This article first studies both the protocols of Time-Triggered Ethernet (TTE) and WDM network. Based on the research, the architecture of Time-Triggered avionics WDM network (TTAWDM) is proposed, contents of which includes Wavelength and Routing Layer, Time Schedule Layer. Secondly two kinds of messages are designed: one is time-triggered message which meets the demand of time-triggered communication and the other one is rate-constrained message which meets the demand of event-triggered communication. The Time Schedule Table for both terminal and optical switch is also designed. Then the paper gives an algorithm of virtual topology of TTAWDM which considers the number of hops and distance. Once, the article solves the routing and wavelength problem, it proposes the time scheduling algorithm terminal and optical switch. Finally, the paper gives an experiment of TTAWDM, and the result shows that TTAWDM can be a totally deterministic network for time-critical messages.