Feasibility study of à PLC system for avionic safety-critical systems
Résumé
To increase the flexibility of the aircraft equipments and to reduce the possession and operating costs of the aircrafts, the main aircraft manufacturers want to change fluidic systems by electrical systems. However, this evolution induces a high increase of the number of wires. Reducing the amount of wiring also allows decreasing the construction and the maintenance costs, and the polluting emissions. The other interest is improving the reliability of aircraft equipment such as allowing monitoring of power cables (telemetry). To limit the number wires, we proposed to use power line communication (PLC) for flight control systems (FCS) on the high voltage direct current network (HVDC), between a calculator unit and a power inverter. PLC technology has proven its reliability for indoor network with the Homeplug Av standard. Nowadays, many studies deal with the possibility to use PLC for embedded systems. However, PLC for safety-critical avionic systems are not often studied.
The proposed transmission technique used is orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), which is widely used with success in many telecommunication systems. In this paper, we present throughput measurement with Homeplug Av modems to prove the feasibility of PLC in aircraft environment. Based on channel transfer function measurements and analysis, we proposed to adapt the OFDM parameters to comply with the FCS real-time constraints.