AWACS Real-Time Operating System

April 1, 2012

LynuxWorks, Inc. announced recently that the Mission Systems and Sensors Division (MS2) of Lockheed Martin in Owego, NY, selected the LynxOS real-time operating system (RTOS) and Luminosity Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for use in conjunction with the United Kingdom’s (UK) Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS).

The UK’s AWACS aircraft were designed to provide an airborne early warning capability by tracking aircraft at extended ranges. The AWACS has become invaluable for airborne command and control and their ability to relay vital information to commanders on the ground. At present the RAF operates seven E-3D Sentry aircraft in the airborne surveillance and commandand- control role. The aircraft are based at RAF Waddington, where they are operated by Nos 8 and 23 Squadrons as the UK’s contribution to the NATO Airborne Early Warning and Control Force. The E-3D also forms one arm of the UK Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition and Reconnaissance (ISTAR) triad of Sentinel R1, E-3D and Nimrod R1 aircraft.

Although primarily procured as an airborne early warning aircraft, the E-3D has been extensively employed in the Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) role. The E-3D Sentry, known to the RAF as the AEW1, is based on the commercial Boeing 707-320B aircraft, which has been extensively modified and updated to accommodate modern mission systems. Mission endurance is approximately 11 hours (over 5000nmls), although this can be extended by air-to-air refuelling. The E-3D is the only aircraft in the RAF’s inventory capable of air-to-air refuelling by both the American ‘flying-boom’ system and the RAF’s ‘probe-and-drogue’ method.

The aircraft cruises at 30,000ft and 400kts and its Northrop Grumman AN/APY-2 high-performance, multimode lookdown radar, housed in the black radome, is able to separate airborne and maritime targets from ground and sea clutter. One E-3D flying at 30,000ft can scan at distances of over 300nmls; it can detect low-flying targets or maritime surface contacts within 215nmls and it can detect medium-level airborne targets at ranges in excess of 280nmls. The multi-mode radar provides lookdown surveillance to the radar horizon and an electronic vertical scan of the radar beam provides target elevation and beyond-the-horizon operation for long-range surveillance of medium and high-altitude aircraft. These attributes allow it to determine the location, altitude, course and speed of large numbers of airborne targets. The aircraft’s mission systems can separate, manage and display targets individually on situation displays within the aircraft, or it can transmit the information to groundbased and ship-based units using a wide variety of digital data links.

The result of 21 years of RTOS experience, LynxOS combines hard real-time embedded technology with broad conformance to open and de facto standards like Linux, POSIX and UNIX. All operating system components within LynxOS are designed for absolute determinism -- hard real-time performance. This means that they absolutely must respond within a known period of time. This predictable response is ensured even in the presence of heavy I/O due to the kernel’s unique threading model, enabling interrupt routines to be extremely short and fast.

LynxOS also exhibits true linear scalability, so that it stays unwaveringly deterministic even as the tasks it performs increase massively. This determinism extends to networking applications, which can stay responsive even in the face of complex demands.

LynxOS includes the latest version of the Luminosity IDE offering powerful development, debug and analysis tools integrated into an industry standard Eclipse-based framework for interoperability. Designed to accelerate time-tomarket for embedded system developers, Luminosity provides a fast and easy way to create, edit, compile, manage, debug and profile C/C++ embedded and real-time applications as well as effectively build and debug kernel downloadable images from configurable LynuxWorks operating systems.