Aircraft Communication Systems - Topologies, Protocols, and Vulnerabilities

Aviation systems are facing fierce competition driven by private investments promoting the development of new avionics suites (AS). With these new AS comes the need for a faster and larger bandwidth requirement for next generation communication systems. The legacy military (MIL) standard 1553 communication system (e.g., 1Mbps) can no longer keep up with the surge in bandwidth demand requirements. The new communication systems need to be designed with a system architecture background that can enable simplistic integration with Information Technology (IT) controlled groundnetworks, military, and commercial payloads. To facilitate a seamless integration with communication architecture, the current system is highly dependent on the Ethernet based IEEE 802.3 standard. Using a standard protocol cuts down on cost and shortens time for accessibility. However, it introduces several other new problems that developers are actively working through. These problems include a loss of redundancy, lower reliability, and cyber-security vulnerabilities. The cyber-security vulnerabilities that are introduced by IEEE 802.3 Ethernet are one of the larger concerns to military defense programs, and other aviation companies. Impacts of these new communication protocols are quantified and presented as cost, redundancy, topology, and vulnerability. This review paper introduces four communication protocols that can replace heritage systems. These protocols are presented and compared against each other in redundancy, reliability, topology and security vulnerabilities in their application on aircraft, space launch vehicles and satellites