Wireless Intra-Aircraft Communication System

In the aerospace industry, wired technology has been used as a means of intra communication between units for several decades. This involved different Line Replaceable Units (LRUs) being connected using wires in the avionics architecture. Onboard cables apart from increasing the weight and in turn the performance, increases the complexity and problems related to electromagnetic interference (EMI). The issue of EMI becomes more pronounced because the cables themselves act as antenna.In addition, fire due to arcing in wires is also an issue. While other industries have moved towards wireless technologies, this has not been done in the aviation industry extensively. Wireless has been introduced in commercial aircraft for entertainment applications. This project demonstrates the implementation of an intra-aircraft wireless communication system with sensor and video data, using Raspberry Pi-3. The communication protocol used is Wi-Fi (802.11n).The aircraft Multi Functional Display (MFD) has been mimicked using MATLAB to display the overlaying functionality of sensor data on the video feed. Security implementation for the communication, between LRUs, has been considered as part of the project, using modified AES-128 for data encryption and XOR encryption for image. The AES-128 has been modified so that the keys are generated using the system time.