Ricerc@Sapienza

The main project objective is to define and test an Ethernet-based architecture able to guarantee the communication services of a satellite launcher. The current available solutions are not suited to be applied in launcher networks because either they are not able to guarantee deterministic and predictable behaviour or they are too costly as the TTEthernet standard.
I propose a low cost solution able to overcome the disadvantages of the Ethernet standard that is the lack of guaranteeing Quality of Service.
The proposed solutions will be based on the following architectural/technological choices:
-use of Common-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) Ethernet technology as much as possible with the addition of the minimum number of functional components for the support of real-time traffic;
-use of traditional Ethernet switches, full duplex transmission and simple network topology in order to reduce the number of both nodes and ports;
-implementation of a real-time layer bypassing the TCP/UDP/IP protocol stack to avoid potential delays introduced by this protocols;
-definition of a layer for the scheduling of messages so as to guarantee the QoS requested by the Guide, Navigation and Control (GNC) and telemetry applications.
I will start from the Flexible Time Triggered Ethernet (FTTE) standard and modify it so as to develop an ad hoc solution for launcher network.
The project is organized in three Work Packages. The WP1 is devoted to identify the networking requirements and study the real time Ethernet networks based on COTS technology. I identify and investigate FFTE-based configurations for the launcher communication system in WP2; a message scheduling algorithm is also defined in this WP. I verify the effectiveness of the proposed solution in WP3 where I develop an experimental test-bed; after developing open source software I perform measure to verify: i) the correct operation mode of the proposed solution; ii) its ability in guaranteeing communications with hard delay.