Hardware implementation of MIL-STD-1553 protocol over OFDMA-PHY based wireless high data rate avionics systems

Abstract

In this paper, a method of improving data rate in avionics systems is proposed which incorporates OFDM transmission technology for high data rate communication. An FPGA-based hardware test bed is developed which uses OFDM physical layer over MIL-STD-1553B communication in RF wireless systems. Finally, a prototype test system is developed using three nodes to emulate Wireless Avionics Intra-Communications (WAIC) over RF systems. The implementation is done on Wireless Open-Access Research Platform (WARP). WARP has virtex-4 FPGA in its core for processing and radio daughter cards that can perform over the air data transmission and reception over 2.4 GHz and 4.5 GHz bands. The real-time performance of the proposed and implemented system is tested using over the air transmission and reception of data traffic. The result shows significant improvement of over the air throughput improvement as compared to the traditional avionics systems with an average Bit Error Rate (BER) satisfying 10−3.