Efficient end-to-end communication services for mixed criticality avionics systems

Avionics Full Duplex Switched Ethernet (AFDX) is a new data network standard for modern avionics systems. Avionics systems are typical mixed criticality systems, where safety-critical and non-safety-critical applications co-exist. Traditional AFDX leverages best-effort redundant transmissions for flows to improve the communication reliability, resulting in the increase of end-to-end delays with weak reliability. In order to bridge the gap between high reliability requirements and short end-to-end delays, we propose a novel scheme, named HERSA (Holistic End-to-End Redundant Scheduling on AFDX). The idea behind HERSA is to leverage a differentiated transmission mode to distinguish safety-critical and non-safety-critical flows, as well as an efficient credit-based scheduling scheme to reduce the serving size for each flow. The salient feature of HERSA is to obtain O(1) complexity and offer the efficient end-to-end transmission services and the guaranteed reliability. We implement HERSA on a real test-bed. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and efficacy of HERSA.