Fieldbus virtualization for Integrated Modular Avionics

The architecture of avionics systems is moving from federated to integrated architecture called Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA). In the IMA architecture, several avionics applications can be transparently integrated on the same computing device and communicate with others without knowing whether others are running on the same node or not. However, the fieldbuses have not been studied thoroughly in the context of IMA architecture though they are quite attractive for implementing avionics data bus. In this paper, we propose a novel design of device-level virtualization to utilize Controller Area Network (CAN) efficiently on various implementations of the IMA architecture. Our proposed device-level virtualization provides virtual CAN devices and emulates the characteristics of CAN bus. We also deal with the issues to support the communication modes defined by ARINC 653¹.