Active delay variation control for improving fault tolerance in an avionics network

Avionics Full DupleX Switched Ethernet (AFDX) is a promising technique that can replace the existing avionics data buses, such as ARINC429 and MIL-STD-1553B. However, when the time interval between the reception of the original frame and its duplicate copy is too large, the redundancy management strategy may fail in some worst case scenarios. In this paper, an active delay variation control algorithm, AVC, is proposed to improve fault tolerance in an avionics network. Meanwhile, a novel local deadline assignment principle based on traffic load is presented. Compared with traditional mechanisms, AVC significantly decreases the delay difference between two redundant frames and improves the system reliability.