Publish/Subscribe Architecture for Airborne Time-triggered Network in Avionics System

Distributed Integrated Modular Avionics (DIMA) is an architectural approach consisting of distributed integrated processing resources connected by a mixed-critical communication network. Time-Triggered Ethernet (TTE) could be applied as the communication network to guarantee the real-time performance of traffic in DIMA. Data Distribution Service (DDS) is proposed to cope with the rapid variation of massive data exchange and information interaction. DDS architecture could only guarantee the real-time performance of distributed systems to some extent. However, the centralized data access middleware of DDS contributes to combining publish/subscribe architecture and time-triggered network in avionics system. In this paper, we first propose the publish/subscribe architecture for time-triggered network and introduce the window activation method based on the publish/subscribe architecture. Then we propose the path planning method for RC traffic to realize load balancing, which uses queuing theory to reduce the computational complexity and end-to-end delay of RC traffic. Experimental results show that compared to the original time-triggered network, the average end-to-end delay and worst-case end-to-end delay of RC traffic could be reduced by up to 12.01% and 21.82% respectively using the window activation method. Also, the online path planning method considerably reduces the average delay and the worst-case end-to-end delay by 75.86% and 22.86% respectively at most.