Abstract:To meet the economic design requirements of aircraft and reduce internal payload, the transition from wired to wireless networks has emerged as a key direction in the upgrade of airborne networks. However, traditional wireless technologies are unable to satisfy the real-time transmission requirements of time-triggered services in airborne networks. In this study, the application characteristics of the airborne wireless communication network (AWCN) are defined, and a hybrid topology is designed by integrating the AWCN with the airborne backbone switching network. By considering conflict-free nodes, interference-free channels, path dependencies, and end-to-end delay requirements, a first-order logic formulation for the deterministic scheduling of time-triggered AWCN is developed. The minimum number of time slots required for scheduling and the primary factors affecting end-to-end delay are theoretically analyzed under different channel configurations. In addition, the expected value of the information age for data flows at the gateway in a steady state is established. A scheduling method based on integer programming is designed, and an incremental solution strategy is proposed to address the low computational efficiency caused by the large number of decision variables and the high coupling of constraints in large-scale networks. The effectiveness of the deterministic scheduling model and theoretical analysis is validated through experiments, and the impact of various scheduling factors on total flow delay and scheduling scale is examined.