Data compression application to the MIL-STD 1553 avionics data bus.

Abstract

With the current state of legacy military avionic systems reaching its ceiling in memory space, processing power, and data-bus through-put (bandwidth), a need has arisen to maximize its limited resources to avoid extensive costs of system overhaul. Specifically, F/A-18 C/D Aircraft is approaching message capacity on its MIL-STD-1553 buses. To slow this assent to capacity limits, one possible solution implements data compression techniques to increase bandwidth. In these efforts, this thesis examines different lossless compression schemes to find ideal options to consider for implementation on MIL-STD-1553 based F/A-18 C/D Aircraft. Several compression routines are identified that provide significant data compression while requiring very little computational effort. A surprising benefit is that the reduction in wasted time spent waiting on data communication more than offsets the time required to compress and decompress the data.