Advanced photonic subsystems to implement reconfigurable, fault-tolerant avionics

Existing and emerging combat, support, and commercial aircraft and rotorcraft will continue to incorporate new sensors, data processors, and related systems that will make the complex, mostly federated avionics systems of the 70´s through 90´s took like antiques. As the data processing, multisensor fusion, and automatic operations continue to burden the conventional avionics infrastructures, new and innovative architectures and subsystems will be needed to meet the high-bandwidth, low-latency, and other criteria of future avionics systems. Implicit in such future systems will be the requirement for fault-tolerance and reconfiguration in the presence of faults. The tremendous growth in the telecommunications infrastructure has led to a series of technologies and devices that provide the basis for unique subsystems that can implement such advanced, reconfigurable, fault-tolerant avionics systems. At Systran Federal Corp., we are developing two photonic subsystems that can realize the vision of such avionics systems. These subsystems are called the JANUS fault-tolerant communications device and the AEGLE photonic switching system. JANUS is a specialized fibre-channel interface that offers 2 Gbit/s of data movement across multiple interfaces. AEGLE is a photonic switching system that incorporates emerging switching devices at its core. This paper provides our vision for the ROSAA (Reconfigurable Open-Systems Avionics Architecture) and details of the JANUS and AEGLE prototype subsystems we are developing to achieve this vision