A Fault Tolerant Software Defined Networking Architecture for Integrated Modular Avionics

The next generation aircrafts rely on the Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) concept with the objective to fulfill the challenging requirements through enabling dynamic resource sharing among the avionics systems. Deterministic Networking (DetNet) is a key technology to provide transmission of time sensitive digital information among IMA sub-systems by obeying their strict timing requirements. As an important feature, DetNet should have a reconfiguration capability to retain the deterministic communication among interconnected systems in case of network failures. In traditional DetNet solutions, the communication reliability between two end systems is maintained by transmitting duplicate data frames over two disjoint paths, one of which will be discarded by the destination end system. This redundant architecture ensures the seamless delivery of data frames even if one of the redundant paths becomes disconnected; however, a subsequent failure on the remaining path breaks down the communication between the corresponding end systems.