Study On Optical Switching In Avionics Optical Network

Avionics network is studied in this thesis, as part of the National Aeronautics Fund Project. The new generation of avionics data communication network is based on fiber optic transmission systems for high-speed data exchange network. Due to the characteristics of high reliability, large capacity, and low delay, Fiber channel(FC) technique as the new bus technology in avionics network has became an attractive candidate. As the optical networks have become the main means of communication in avionics systems to substitute the traditional electricity network, the optical switching technology is of great practical significance in avionics network. The study in this thesis includes the architecture design of optical switching system in avionics network, the key device selection, routing and wavelength assignment and other corresponding research to achieve wavelength switching in avionic network.Different from common commercial networks, avionics network has a large number of short network links and a large number of inter-terminal nodes. High bandwidth, high reliability and low latency communication needs must be meted when designing avionics network design. However, only utilizing an optical switching technology or an electrical packet switching technique cannot meet all of these needs. Therefore, in this paper, a novel hybrid switching architecture is proposed to meet the communication needs by employing wavelength switching technologies and traditional FC electrical switching technology.In this paper, a novel hybrid switching architecture employing optical circuit switching and FC electrical switching was proposed and presented for intra-subnet and inter-subnet communication respectively with high degree of connectivity and low latency. For intra-subnet, wavelength switching can guarantee wide-bandwidth and real-time communication, while for inter-subnet, the adoption of electricity exchange can sustain the interconnection of a large number of ports. Due to the special spatial and spectral properties of arrayed waveguide grating router(AWGR), it is suitable for future photonic communication networks. The wavelength switching topology and wavelength allocation scheme have been studied and designed based on the structure of AWGR. The energy consumption and time delay between the proposed hybrid switching architecture and traditional electrical switching system have been deduced and simulated using OPNET software. The proposed scheme is mainly based on FC protocol and optical passive components, and it can decrease the time delay and enlarge the network capacity.Avionic platforms pose stringent requirements on the power consumption, which directly affects aircraft fuel efficiency and the overall cost. According to the deduced results that by utilizing optical passive components to realize optical switching would reduced power consumption, employing the proposed hybrid switching architecture to substitute the traditional electrical switching system in avionics network can lower energy consumption. In addition, the experiments of wavelength exchange have been done to verify the feasibility of wavelength routing and real-time performance of the proposed scheme.