Feature article: Definition and performance evaluation of an advanced avionic TTEthernet architecture for the support of launcher networks

Standard Ethernet has been well established and widely used in office and home networks known as Local Area Networks (LAN). In the recent decade, standard Ethernet has been widely adopted into other network domains such as industrial automation, automotive, railway, and aerospace domains [1], [2]. One of the main attractions of Ethernet is its high bandwidth, a bandwidth that is much higher than in other communication networks. Another one is that the prices of commercial-off-the-shelf standard Ethernet components are relatively low [3], [4]. Since standard Ethernet was not originally designed to be capable of providing temporal guarantees for real-time communication, there have been many protocol designs adapting standard Ethernet to being capable of providing such temporal guarantees. Some examples are: EtherCAT, Ethernet/ IP, PROFINET [5], Avionic Full Duplex Ethernet, and Time- Triggered (TT) Ethernet (TTEthernet) [6].