Satellite or deep space exploration spacecraft avionics design is strongly determined by the need to achieve a long lifetime and to autonomously maintain safe operations in case of failure.
To cope with an increasing demand in on-board processing and to make architectures more scalable and modular, future spacecraft data management architectures are about to implement solutions selected today by the commercial aircraft industry such as a central high speed backbone network linking processing nodes, with local lower throughput buses enabling such nodes to interact with sensors, effectors and other avionics equipment.
Some specific issues to be consolidated today are the sequencing of communications between the high speed backbone and the local buses, the overall fault detection, isolation and recovery strategy and the priority management and monitoring functions to be included within backbone routers.
From an avionics engineering perspective, model driven engineering techniques are now being used to validate operation scenarios, estimate performances and ensure seamless transition between architectural design and the development of resulting hardware and software constituents. A valuable method to deal with the a.m. data management networking issues is to use the AADL (Architecture Analysis and Design Language), an SAE standard.
The scope of this document is to perform a review of the state-of-the-art of reconfigurable, faulttolerant applications of router-based high speed data networks (mainly in aeronautics and automotive industries). Furthermore to compare and support the selection of solutions suited to spacecraft onboard networking needs through the use of AADL and provide feedback on the applied engineering methodology.
Source: Luleå University of Technology
Author: Yago Montenegro Mendez