Performance evaluation of TSN-based communication system for the next generation launch vehicle

The objective of the paper is to propose and evaluate the performance of a Time Sensitive Network architecture applied in Next Generation Launch Vehicle in order to interconnect the terminals (on-board computer, telemetry apparatus, Inertial Reference System,...) performing the Guide, Navigation and Control (GNC) operations and producing/receiving telemetry traffic. The aerospace sector has shown increasing interest in adopting deterministic Ethernet-based technologies to replace legacy solutions such as the MIL-STD-1553B bus, which suffers from limited bandwidth and high maintenance costs. Time Sensitive Networking (TSN), a recent evolution of standard Ethernet developed under the IEEE 802.1 working group, offers a promising open alternative. Designed to support time, mission-, and safety-critical traffic, TSN introduces intrinsic mechanisms such as traffic scheduling, time synchronization, and stream reservation directly into the Ethernet protocol stack. These features make TSN suitable for industrial and aerospace domains requiring hard real-time guarantees. The main contributions of the paper are the following: i) the design of a TSN-based network architecture tailored for small launchers within the framework of the NRRP System Integrated Avionic (SIA) technological development, capable of supporting services with deterministic delay requirements; ii) the implementation of a simple yet representative testbed, based on TSN device kits arranged in a daisy-chain topology with redundant communication paths; iii) the performance evaluation based on the Inter Frame Space Jitter (IFSJ) and Absolute Delay Jitter (ADJ) metrics, using a realistic traffic scenario representative of the Next Generation Launch Vehicle (NGLV). Results demonstrate that the proposed TSN architecture meets stringent determinism requirements, achieving IFSJ values below 50 ns.