SpaceFibre Multi-lane SpaceFibre, Long Paper

SpaceFibre is a multi-Gbits/s, on-board network technology for spaceflight applications, which runs over electrical or fiber-optic cables. SpaceFibre supports multi-lane, thus allowing data to be sent over several individual physical lanes to enhance throughput and robustness. This is required by new generation payloads, such as SAR and multi-spectral imaging instruments. This paper describes the development of the multi-lane capabilities of SpaceFibre and its successful hardware implementation on space-qualified devices. The protocol has been designed to work with an arbitrary number of bidirectional or unidirectional lanes. In the event of a lane failing, SpaceFibre multi-lane mechanism supports hot redundancy and graceful degradation by automatically spreading traffic over the remaining working lanes. User data transfer is resumed in just a few microseconds without any data loss. These advanced capabilities are not provided in other high-speed link protocols available for space applications.