A fault-tolerant network architecture for integrated avionics

The Army fault-tolerant architecture (AFTA) under construction at the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory is an example of a highly integrated critical avionics system. The AFTA system must connect to other redundant and nonredundant systems, as well as to input/output devices. A fault-tolerant data bus (FTDB) for highly reliable communication between the AFTA computer and other network stations is described. The FTDB is designed for Byzantine resilience and is probably capable of tolerating any single arbitrary fault. The author describes a prototype architecture for the fault-tolerant data bus