Design for Internet of Things in Aerospace
2022-26-1252
05/26/2022
- Event
- Content
- Internet of Things (IoT) is being adopted in aerospace industry, be it a ground based or airborne systems, the scope of IoT is enormous and advantages are limitless, which are not limited to reduced weight, reduced power consumption and reduced operational cost and time. Some of the use cases are to have an IoT based edge computing nodes (ECN) to transfer digitized data from sensors to the centralized computing system and RFID based baggage and cargo tracking system. This paper focuses on critical design requirements for IoT devices in aircraft, opportunity to harvest energy for the IoT devises from Aircraft thermal dissipation and vibration, cybersecurity threats and encryption solutions, power optimization for extended battery life in the devices, existing technology advancements and DO guidance to deploy IoT solutions in aerospace. This synopsis contains the introduction to the below topics, the final paper will have the details, example design and analysis results. Power optimization The IoT devices are predominantly operated by battery but battery replacements in the systems which are placed in various remote locations in the aircraft becomes an overhead. Thus, designing a IoT system to operate in low power becomes a critical requirement. Power harvesting Aircraft engines and other systems produces enormous heat which are dissipated, on the other side these dissipated thermal energy could produce the power required for a low power IoT devices. Similarly, a piezo electric device based power harvesting solution could generate a stable two to three watts of power sufficient to continuously harvest power from aircraft vibration. Cybersecurity and data encryption The advantage of IoT comes from wireless communication but wireless communication is vulnerable to cyber-attack and data theft. The recent aerospace cyber security guidance like DO-326A and DO-356A enables to overcome these limitations and encryption solutions like Physically Unclonable Functions (PUF) could prevent the IoT systems from cyber-attack. Multicore - System on Chip Multicore processing is no-more newer to aerospace, with the guidance from CAST 32A, multicore processing capability could enable processing enormous IoT data faster and at relatively lesser power than multiple single core computing devices. IMA and Data Processing Units With the industry expertise to build applications using RTOS as per ARINC-653 and IMA development & certification guidance DO-297 enables the industry to develop and certify centralized high processing capable computing systems to process huge data from multiple IoT devices. Aircraft and Ground station Communication The availability of systems like Aircraft Interface Devices (AID) capable of communicating with ground stations over multiple channels like VHF, UHF, Satellite communication and 5G cellular network, enables to transfer the processed IoT data to the ground stations in real time for further AI-ML based data analytics and responding with the critical data back to the aircraft, for the pilot and the crew to make critical decisions. Venkatesan M Collins Aerospace.
- Citation
- Muthulingam, V., "Design for Internet of Things in Aerospace," SAE Technical Paper 2022-26-1252, 2022, .