Optical Networking for Aerospace Systems Provisioned through Plug-and-play Avionics

A high performance extension of the space plug-and-play avionics (SPA) technology is described based on the addition of optical fibers. This optical SPA (“SPA-O”), due to the bandwidth potential, provides the possibility of rendering super-computing systems rapidly in orbital platforms. By exploiting the ideas of SPA, the optical properties of SPA components can be added to electronic datasheets embedded within the component so that the system-at-large can discover these components and exploit them in dynamically provisionable optical networks formed on demand.