SpaceFibre networks: SpaceFibre, long paper

SpaceFibre [1][2][3] is the next generation of SpaceWire [4] on-board data-handling network technology for spaceflight operations, which runs over both electrical and fibre optic media. SpaceFibre has many benefits compared to SpaceWire, including much higher data-rates, integrated quality of service, fault recovery capabilities, multi-laning with graceful degradation and hot and cold redundancy, and low-latency broadcast messages that can carry 8-bytes of user information. Importantly SpaceFibre is backwards compatible with SpaceWire at the network level, allowing existing SpaceWire equipment to be incorporated into a SpaceFibre network without modification. SpaceFibre networks have been defined by the University of Dundee and STAR-Dundee, and incorporated in the network layer definition of the current draft SpaceFibre standard. STAR-Dundee has designed a SpaceFibre routing switch to evaluate various routing concepts, validate the standard specification and demonstrate a complete SpaceFibre network. A demonstration system has been built and key parts of the SpaceFibre network technology have been demonstrated.