Open Generic Avionics Architectures and Distributed Processing Using Ethernet and VPX

The backplane and hardware module standards help to increase part commonality and the reuse of components in different system architectures and applications, but this is only one part of the system design challenge. While the specified footprint, backplane format, and electrical signal characteristics help the design of modular hardware and open architectures, they still tell very little about how modular (and unambiguous) the interfacing among functions and their interactions are. This aspect is covered at the system integration (network) layer.