Evolutions of SpaceWire Protocols for Deterministic Data Delivery: Networks and Protocols, Short Paper

The primary application domain of SpaceWire networks has traditionally been payload data handling, whereas communication related to command and control has been implemented with other types of networks, since the basic SpaceWire protocol cannot provide deterministic data delivery. There have been several protocols proposed that add determinism to SpaceWire, including SpaceWire-RT, SpaceWire-T, and SpaceWire-D. This paper presents further evolutions in this area based on SpaceWire-D as the starting point. A new protocol called Mixed Criticality Message Passing protocol (MCMP) is proposed, together with a new intermediate protocol for transferring data in time slots instead of RMAP, called the MCMP Register Access Protocol. The protocol has been implemented and tested in the MOST-X network simulator.