Wireless Asynchronous Transfer Mode based fly-by-wireless avionics network

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the fly-by-wireless technology to address the problems and costs introduced by cables, which is considered as a revolution in aerospace vehicle architecture for avionics instrumentation and control. As early investigates suggested, some basic features and advantages of Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) mechanism have been considered for avionics applications, specially the virtual link scheme adopted in the current wired avionics network, e.g., Full Duplex Switched Ethernet (AFDX) etc. In this paper, Wireless Asynchronous Transfer Mode (WATM) technology is proposed to establish a fly-by-wireless avionics network. The WATM is introduced to the current wired airborne backbone network, i.e., AFDX and Time-Trigger Ethernet (TTE), to construct a hybrid system, which offers reliable and efficient wireless access not only for the avionics terminals, but also for the terminals in the flight control system to accomplish the fly-by-wireless. This scheme has less modification to the original wired backbone network. The WATM APs are employed for wireless access, and the WATM-AFDX/TTE adaptor translates the protocol between the ATM section and backbone network section. The redundancy management and integrity checking are utilized to improve the performance of network to satisfy the QoS requirements of the flight control system.