As the aviation industry progresses towards More Electric Aircraft (MEA), the demand for robust and efficient data communication systems intensifies. Traditional fieldbus systems are burdened by high installation costs and substantial weight due to extensive cabling requirements. The Power Line Communication (PLC) technology presents a promising alternative; however, its adaptation to the stringent real-time demands of airborne environments poses significant challenges. To address this, this paper introduces a novel Credit-Based Shaper with Channel Contention (CBSCC) mechanism designed to optimize traffic management in airborne PLC networks. This mechanism operates at the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer of the HomePlug AV 2 protocol, employing a dynamic configuration approach informed by Network Calculus (NC). This approach utilizes End-to-End Delay (E2ED) requirements of data flows and network configuration details to calculate the parameters for the CBSCC traffic shaper. Comprehensive simulations conducted with OMNeT++ demonstrate the efficacy of CBSCC, demonstrating marked improvements in E2ED satisfaction for all data frames, reduced average access delays, and enhanced fairness across different priority levels compared to the HomePlug AV2 protocol and previous traffic management strategies. The findings confirm that the CBSCC mechanism substantially alleviates the starvation of lower-priority traffic, boosts network efficiency, and ensures robust real-time guarantees essential for the safety and reliability of airborne communication systems. This research represents a substantial advancement over existing solutions, aligning with the evolving needs of MEA implementations.

Abstract In avionics system networking, mixed‐critical networks are commonly used to integrate system applications with different levels of guarantees for various traffic classes on a shared resource platform, effectively addressing issues such as cabling, cost, weight, volume, power consumption, etc. However, current fault recovery and reconfiguration techniques mainly focus on high‐priority time‐triggered (TT) traffic, often neglecting the impact of TT traffic reconfiguration on low‐priority traffic. This paper proposes an avionics mixed‐critical networking approach based on the IEEE 802.1CB protocol, which is shown to be more effective for the post‐failure recovery of Rate‐Constrained (RC) traffic (a typical type of low‐priority traffic in TT networks). Furthermore, an elastic reconfiguration algorithm is presented to ensure quality of service for RC traffic during and after reconfiguration, preventing arbitrary application and traffic shutdown triggered by TT traffic reconfiguration. Simulations demonstrate that the proposed approach and algorithm can significantly improve the post‐failure recovery ratio of RC traffic, as well as guarantee quality of service and network throughput of RC traffic during and after reconfiguration to a certain extent.

Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) evolves from Ethernet AVB in which the Credit-Based Shaping (CBS) is employed to guarantee the deterministic transmission of traffic. In CBS, the real-time performance of traffic associated with the credits can practicably settle the uncertainty of queueing and forwarding for stream-reservation traffic. Hence, the optimization of bandwidth allocation under the CBS becomes a key point to ensure guaranteed performance in the network. In this paper, a bandwidth allocation method is proposed for stream-reservation traffic while the real-time requirements are satisfied. We first illustrate the significance of appropriate bandwidth allocation for traffic under the CBS and construct a general schema for its bandwidth allocation. Also, the influences of the protected window for Control Data Traffic (CDT) on stream-reservation traffic are considered in our method. Further, mathematical models are constructed to analyze the delay bounds and backlogs of traffic to form the feedback for the optimal bandwidth allocation process. Finally, two node-level cases with different bandwidth utilization and a synthetic industrial networking scenario are carried out to demonstrate our method. The results confirm that the excessive reserved bandwidth does not necessarily decrease the delay bound, especially under the high traffic loads scenario. A more desirable bandwidth allocation strategy under the CBS mechanism is that the reserved bandwidth should be just enough according to the traffic loads to ensure the deterministic transmission of traffic.

During Bluetooth device discovery process, nodes enter inquiry substate to discover other nodes within the range by periodically sending inquiry packets on a predetermined frequency partition of hop frequencies used by neighbouring piconets. Intuitively, potential collisions will occur between inquiry packets and packets exchanged between piconet nodes during connection state, which lead to degraded network performance and longer discovery process. So, the authors developed an analytical model for interference caused by a single inquiring node, and extended the model to account for interference levels due to multiple inquirers. The authors further validated the analytical model through a simulation scenario and found that the probability of packets interfered and disrupted during inquiry procedure is periodic by repeating every 3.16 s. Analytical and simulation results reveal that a single inquiring node can disrupt up to 1.5% of network packets for approximately half of this period, and with the increased number of inquiring nodes, the interference levels become more crucial approaching 35.3%.

In this paper, we evaluate scalable coherent interface (SCI) as avionics real-time network. An OPNET based SCI node model is established. The results of our preliminary experiments show that a certain utilization of network load should be maintained in order to guarantee the timely delivery of real-time messages in avionics system where basic SCI ring is adopted.

A bandwidth allocation scheme for a linear token passing multiplex data bus is proposed based on balancing message transmission time with traffic load to each node. It is proved to provide a network worst case achievable utilization of 50%. Under this allocation scheme, closed-form expressions for the initialized value of token holding timers and token rotation timers in each node are obtained.

This paper provides a study of the use of linear token passing bus (LTPB) networks to support real-time communication in mission-critical systems. According to the exact network timing property, an optimal bandwidth allocation scheme (OLA) for LTPB networks and a real-time performance analysis method based on WCAU (worst available utilization) are proposed. Formal proof that OLA has a better performance than any other scheme is given. Finally examples are presented to demonstrate the correctness of the conclusion.