Integrated communication systems architecture

Military aircraft communications fits consist largely of a number of discrete functional `black boxes´, with very little commonality or interconnectional. The operation implications of this approach are high crew workload, poor system availability, high maintenance costs, poor utilisation of space, and lengthy timescales for system updates. A number of initiatives have been taken to address these problems, and vary from the study of a fully modular approach at one extreme, to the use of highly adaptive and reprogrammable functional `black boxes´. The author compares the simple and sophisticated approaches and attempts to show that, although the sophisticated approach brings further benefits it does so at very substantial cost in both financial and technical terms