Critical Packet Loss Improvement in the AFDX Communication Protocol

Abstract

Nowadays, Avionics Full Duplex Switched Ethernet (AFDX), as a safety-critical communication protocol, is employed in modern aircrafts, such as the Boeing B787 and Airbus A380. This protocol has been equipped with a variety of fault tolerance techniques. However, some of these techniques (e.g., a protecting technique from the babbling-idiot failure) may result in some consequences such as packet loss. AFDX is a real-time communication protocol and therefore, if a packet arrives after its deadline, the packet will be discarded in the receiver node. In this paper, a traffic policing algorithm and a scheduling algorithm are proposed to resolve the mentioned issues. To evaluate the proposed technique, the primary and the improved AFDX networks have been simulated with OPNET simulator. The simulation results have been seen that the number of lost packets, due to deadline miss, is decreased about 10%. Furthermore, the number of discarded packets due to the traffic policing algorithm has been improved up to 100%.