Dependable Onboard Local-area Photonic Interconnection Network

Avionics and aerospace systems continue to include increasingly numerous and complex applications and devices. This trend creates escalating volumes of data that need to be shared and distributed throughout the platform, motivating the avionics community to find a new and powerful network that will meet these demands. Advanced optical networks featuring wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) and have been targeted as the technology of choice to realize the desired avionics network of the future. There are numerous advantages that WDM networks can offer, some of which include almost unlimited bandwidth potential, resistance to electromagnetic interference, and the potential for a unified network with protocol independence. Despite these many major advantages, there are just as many challenges when considering optical network technology to realize a high-performance, local-area network (LAN). Traditionally, optical WDM links have been reserved for long-haul links and high-bandwidth trunks. These have drastically different demands than an avionics LAN, where links are relatively short and numerous, and whose environment is extremely harsh and dynamic. Additionally, an avionics network needs to be highly reliable, fault-tolerant, scalable, and flexible, while providing high performance over a long technology life-cycle.

Sponsored by the Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR), researchers at the University of Florida are conducting investigations with WDM LANs to serve current and future generations of avionics platforms. The work in this project, in conjunction with the current efforts of the SAE WDM LAN working groups, is intended to lead to the standardization of a WDM network potentially applicable for today's and tomorrow's generations of both military and commercial avionics platforms.

The initial stages of this project have focused on virtual prototyping of potential WDM LAN ideas and architectures. Due to the high cost of prototyping and integration with existing systems, a simulation environment to perform tradeoff analysis can be the most cost-effective approach. A careful review of existing simulation tools revealed that no single tool could fulfill these requirements without modification. Therefore, a new optical component library was developed and added to an existing commercial tool to bridge the gap between optical-centric and network-centric simulation and performance analysis tools. The Library for Integrated Optical Networks (LION) provides researchers with an extendable tool to assess both lower- and upper-layer networking issues simultaneously by providing a set of accurate optical components within a powerful network simulation environment. Developed at the University of Florida, LION was created in a discrete-event simulation environment called MLDesigner from MLDesign Technologies, and has been the primary tool for evaluating and comparing the performance of WDM LAN architectures in this research.

In upcoming stages of this project, select candidate architectures will be chosen for in-depth analysis and design, including the fabrication of experimental testbeds for further analysis. Such in-depth analyses will occur after numerous WDM LAN architectures are considered and evaluated. These architectures represent vastly different approaches to solutions for a WDM LAN. A down-selection of the most promising candidates will be conducted using results from extensive simulative experiments, in addition to analytical considerations of fault-tolerance and cost. After the architecture down-selection has taken place, the chosen candidate designs will be evaluated extensively by simulative and experimental means. Small-scale experimental testbeds for each selected will be constructed by the STTR team.  The experimental testbeds will be used to both validate our physical component models while providing performance results and a physical proof-of-concept for the design.

Publications to Date from this Research

	C. Reardon, J. Profumo, and A. George, "Wavelength Allocation Strategies in Optically Switched Networks for Avionics," to appear in Avionics Fiber-Optics and Photonics (AVFOP) Conference, Annapolis, MD, Sep. 12-14, 2006. Click here for a copy of the current manuscript.
	C. Reardon, I. Troxel and A. George, "Virtual Prototyping of WDM Avionics Networks," Avionics Fiber-Optics and Photonics (AVFOP) Conference, MIT Lincoln Lab, Minneapolis, MN, Sep. 20-22, 2005. Click here for a copy of the manuscript. (A copy of the PowerPoint file presented at AVFOP is available as well)
	C. Reardon, J. Profumo, and A. George, "Comparitive Simulative Analysis of WDM LANs For Avionics Platforms," submitted to the Military Communications Conference (MILCOM), Washington, D.C., Oct. 23-25, 2006.

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