Master Thesis MSTR-2025-06

BibliographyJoshi, Tanmay: Plug and Fly Avionics: Integrating the Internet of Light protocol into the PAFA middleware.
University of Stuttgart, Faculty of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Information Technology, Master Thesis No. 6 (2025).
43 pages, english.
Abstract

This thesis investigates the integration of the Internet of Light (IOL) protocol into the Plug & Fly Avionics (PAFA) middleware. The IOL protocol is one of the protocols used in aircraft lighting systems. The PAFA platform continually needs to discover the topology of all connected components; to achieve this, PAFA sends out periodic advertisement messages, which assist in discovering topology members, and these topology devices should respond with a self-description response that informs PAFA about each component’s capabilities and resources. The research aims to make the lighting system operating on the IOL protocol compatible with the self-discovery mechanism. This is achieved by developing a self-discovery software solution for the IOL lighting systems, thus enabling communication with the PAFA middleware and vice versa while adhering to safety-critical software standards (JSF++). To facilitate the self-discovery functionality in a lighting system, gateway software was developed, which adds the self-discovery capability to the lighting system and enables communication between the IOL lighting system and PAFA. The gateway will manage all self-discovery requests from other network devices and PAFA. For this purpose, the gateway will periodically query all connected IOL peripherals, collecting peripheral data. When the gateway receives a self-description request, it will construct a self-description response using the stored data and send it out. To verify the gateway, functional tests and latency measurements were performed. The loop latency between the gateway and a peripheral device for all commands was way less than the 3-second specification. By integrating this developed solution, the PAFA platform now can discover the connected IOL component (its capabilities and resources) and its topology, as well as send a control command to the IOL-based device.

Department(s)University of Stuttgart, Institute of Parallel and Distributed Systems, Distributed Systems
Superviser(s)Becker, Prof. Christian, Lüttig, Dr. Bastian; Geppert, Heiko; Kühn, Mario Jens-Peter
Entry dateMay 13, 2025
   Publ. Computer Science