Comparison of high speed networks in avionics

Airplanes and helicopters have many sensors and terminal systems scattered throughout their fuselage. Aircrafts need more bandwidth and higher broadband communication backbones due to the ever-increasing sensor load (radar, electronic warfare, radio, camera, etc.). Legacy protocols such as ARINC-429 and MIL-STD-1553 used in the communication of these edge systems are insufficient to meet the increasing bandwidth requirements of today's aircrafts. Despite this, these legacy networks are still in use because they have the features required by avionic systems, such as reliability and high fault tolerance. For this reason, different technologies with high bandwidth have been developed, which have high quality of service and are suitable for critical systems, as in these old networks. Avionics Full-Duplex Switched Ethernet (AFDX) protocol, which is a special implementation of Airbus patented ARINC-664 Part 7, has come to the fore in recent years. Another prominent solution is the Time Triggered Ethernet (TTEthernet) protocol patented by TTTech. This study simulates and compares these two protocols from the perspective of avionics by modeling them in the OMNET++ simulation environment. The simulation results have shown that TTEthernet networks will be more efficient than AFDX in new generation aircrafts.