Comparative study of Ethernet technologies for next-generation satellite on-board networks

The spacecraft industry is facing a new challenge: new missions and customers require always more on-board performance. The current satellite network technologies will not be able to handle this increasing demand for long which leads the spacecraft industry to consider an upgrade of their satellite on-board networks. One opportunity has appeared through the use of Ethernet technologies to benefit from COTS components of a mass market. In this paper we discuss the suitability of several Ethernet technologies/standards with respect to the requirements of a satellite network in a qualitative approach. We will compare Ethernet, ARINC 664, TTEthernet and Time Sensitive Networking under three properties i.e. their quality of service capabilities, their synchronization capabilities and their fault tolerance capabilities.