Home // International Journal On Advances in Telecommunications, volume 8, numbers 1 and 2, 2015 // View article

Feasibility Study of a PLC System for Avionic Safety-Critical Systems

Authors:
Thomas Larhzaoui
Fabienne Nouvel
Jean-Yves Baudais
Virginie Dégardin
Pierre Laly

Keywords: PLC; OFDM; coherence bandwidth; delay spread; insertion gain; channel impulse response; aircraft; avionic; bit rate; safety critical systems; HVDC network.

Abstract:
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. Another interest is improving the reliability of aircraft equipment such as allowing monitoring of power cables. 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 for medium-haul aircrafts. 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. This paper attempts to define the physical layer for such application. 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. However, the Homeplug Av parameters are not adapted to the aeronautic constraints. Based on channel transfer function measurements and analysis, we proposed to adapt the OFDM parameters to comply with the FCS real-time constraints.

Pages: 1 to 8

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2015. Used with permission.

Publication date: June 30, 2015

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2601