Aircraft harness measurement campaign and investigations on introducing one pair Ethernet

Abstract

In this paper, the results of a measurement campaign on the data harness of an A321 aircraft will be presented. The S-parameters of the cabin harnesses of an existing system are illustrated, and these parameters will be used to model a cabin architecture based on the existing harnesses. This A321 aircraft, where the measurements were performed, is a 20-year-old aircraft; hence possible cable aging will be discussed. The currently used aeronautical-certified cables show a great potential on introducing new technologies to the aircraft cabin, driven from the automotive industry (like 100BASE-T1 or 1000BASE-T1), thus increasing the available bandwidth by a factor of up to 500 times compared with the existing systems, without increasing the most important factor for aircrafts, weight.