Next Generation Avionics Networking Based on Fiber Optic Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM)

The aerospace industry has an every increasing appetite for bandwidth for on board networking for their aircraft. Future projections suggest that aircraft of the future tied into the information grid will require terahertz of intra aircraft bandwidth connecting to hundreds of nodes. This paper describes some of the lessons learned by observing the commercial industry's thirty to forty year history deploying networks. It concludes by describing the standards development effort by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) to develop a wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) local area network (LAN) standard over standard telecommunications grade optical fiber.