Design of Communication Protocol for SpaceWire On-Board Networks.

SpaceWire is a newly developed serial link standard, and has been recommended as the next generation onboard data bus by ESA and NASA. One application of SpaceWire is to be used as the sole bus for the unified on-board communication infrastructure. As typical real-time systems, on-board networks usually have strict requirements for message transfer delay. However, the classical SpaceWire network is fundamentally multi-nodes, asynchronous and event-triggered, which is not designed to provide the guaranteed message transfer delay. This has become a bottleneck for its application in the unified on-board communication infrastructure. So a time-triggered communication protocol is proposed for SpaceWire on-board networks in this paper. In addition, the corresponding communication scheduling algorithm is devised. By reasonable planning, network nodes transmit communication data only in the allocated windows. This avoids network congestion caused by resource conflict, and the guaranteed message transfer delay is thus provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]