Affordable avionic networks with Gigabit Ethernet assessing the suitability of commercial components for airborne use

A variety of networking standards have been proposed and implemented to provide real-time network performance guarantees in embedded systems. These standards all focus on bounding individual message latency; however, we argue that this is not the most important measure for a large class of avionic systems. We show the key metric for this class of architectures, and present the results of an experiment using standard commercial-grade Gigabit Ethernet equipment to assess the suitability of COTS components in this environment. The path to more affordable future avionic architectures may be open now.