Thales – Time Sensitive Network (TSN) reconfiguration
Abstract: “Avionics Full Duplex (AFDX), an avionic real-time Ethernet, is the current data backbone of most modern civil aircraft. However, a new technology, the Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN), is gaining a lot of attention. TSN offers several advantages over traditional AFDX networks, including enhanced determinism, scalability, and interoperability. One notable advantage of TSN lies in its capability to support mixed-critical applications within the same network infrastructure. This means that TSN can accommodate a diverse range of data traffic with varying levels of importance or urgency, from critical flight control systems to less time-sensitive passenger entertainment systems, all within a single network framework.
Due to specific environment conditions, faults may occur in avionic networks: vibrations, temperature conditions, etc. This may lead to a breakdown of one or several network equipments. While in AFDX, each equipment is duplicated to cope with such situations, TSN offers the opportunity of a more flexible approach: the reconfiguration of the faulty network. While it is common in common networks to use a different path in case of link failure, in real-time networks, the new configuration must continue ensuring real-time guarantees..”
The challenge consists in providing architectures and algorithms designed to handle safe TSN reconfiguration for embedded networks..
The challenge has been presented by Marc Boyer (ONERA) and Rafik Henia (Thales) during ECRTS 2024.
The full description of the challenge is available in the ECRTS proceedings. Code is available on github.