Network Centric Systems for Space Applications

Serious problems we face within avionics development of every new spacecraft are: the huge cost and long development time due to the interfaces specification, which has to be written and specified for every satellite from scratch. Furthermore we must consider the extremely high costs and almost no post-development reuse of the board computer. Our strategy is what we call network centric computing. We aim to create a spacecraft area network (SCAN) to which all devices and computers are attached. We aim to create a high speed interconnection link definition, which is so simple that it can be implemented and used by each and every one. We have already developed reference implementations, which will be distributed as open source for both field programmable gate array (FPGA) intellectual property (IP) cores and software middleware. The presented SCAN middleware switch is currently in development in Europe as an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC).