Forward End-To-End delay Analysis for AFDX networks

Packet switched networks and message multiplexing have been a major upgrade for industrial systems communications. In the avionics domain, this evolution was brought by the introduction of Avionics Full Duplex Switched Ethernet (AFDX). Guaranteed upper bounds of end-to-end delays for messages transmitted over an AFDX network are mandatory for certification reasons. In this article, we present the Forward end-to-end delay Analysis (FA), which is scalable to both large and heavily loaded configurations. A formal proof of FA is detailed and the approach is compared with alternative methods (Network Calculus and the Trajectory approach) on two types of AFDX configurations (including a real industrial architecture).