Instrumentation of Advanced Avionics Suites Using Real Time Data Compression Techniques

Advanced avionics architectures (AAA) will be incorporated into future aircraft designs employing computational systems far more complex than current systems. In order to provide instrumentation support during the design, development, and test of these avionics, a number of technical issues must be addressed. The purpose of this paper is to address these issues and define an approach for developing advanced avionics instrumentation. Typically, a data system must have at a minimum, the same communications capabilities as the system under test. For example, in advanced avionics architectures, fiber optic and electrical data buses will communicate at data rates from 1 to 1000 Mega Bits per Second (MBS). Instrumentation and analysis systems will have to collect, correlate, and compress the data in order to integrate and validate the avionics system designs. Real time data compression will be required to reduce the storage device requirements and simplify the data analysis process.