High Performance Photonic Avionics Networking using WDM

Photonic networking technologies have the potential to revolutionise future military aircraft data communications, delivering substantial improvements in networking performance, reliability, cost and security. More particularly, wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) can provide a huge bandwidth-to-weight ratio as well as enhanced routing flexibility, connectivity and network survivability. In this paper, the envisaged functional and operational requirements of next-generation avionics communications architectures are first discussed. Then a suitable high performance, high connectivity photonic network architecture is proposed, which, for the first time, uses a novel adaptation of Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) to enable operation in the hostile aerospace environment without additional environmental conditioning. COTS compliance, protocol support and the relative performance of various operating modes are also examined.