Terabit optical Ethernet for avionics

Abstract

Avionics platforms can benefit enormously by using standard communications protocols like Ethernet, in terms of cost and power efficiency. The performance of future aviation communications networks will be required to handle aircraft functions as well as potentially massive data collection, storage, retrieval and processing. The bisectional bandwidth of future avionics platforms could easily exceed Petabytes with video based applications and possibly reach the capacity of small data centers. The performance requirements for these systems will be latency and throughout. since avionics platforms have the potential to advance on a different standards track than terrestrial systems, Terabit Ethernet could become a reality before the terrestrial standards bodies move from 400 Gigabit per second Ethernet to Terabit. Another potentially powerful driver for Terabit Ethernet is that the reach on airframes is relatively short and Terabit transmission impairments not as critical.