A Survey of Time and Space Partitioning for Space Avionics

Abstract

We present a survey of the current state of the reseach on time and space partitioning for space avionics. The availability of ever more powerful computers allows to assign many control tasks to a single computer easily, in principle. But in its naive form, this would mean too much effort and thus cost for demonstrating dependability. For aircraft, there is already an approach to solve this problem, the Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) architecture. For spacecraft, the basic problem is similar. But in detail, the setting is different, though. This report compiles a survey and identifies relevant research challenges. Based on some of them, we propose to design a multi-core processor architecture that avoids fundamental problems of the current architectures with respect to time partitioning, and that can be used in the space domain.