This fine paper delivers exactly what its title promises: an overview of the rationale for and technical characteristics of the Mil-Std-1553B serial bus standard, including a comparison to Ethernet, Intel’s Bitbus, and ARINC’s 429 standards. The material is very readable. Readers with a reasonable understanding of the technology of any local area network will have no difficulty in grasping the salient features of the 1553B bus from this paper.

The author, however, is clearly a partisan of the 1553B technology and slightly overstates its usefulness and appeal outside the military aircraft environment for which it was originally conceived by the US Air Force. For example, he rejects Ethernet on the grounds that its contention-based CSMA protocol leads to nondeterministic response times, which are unacceptable in real-time environments. In fact, if, as in the 1553B environment, only one bus controller were allowed on an Ethernet, there would be no collisions and response time would be predictable.

With 10 mbit/sec Ethernet and 16 mbit/sec token ring networks available, I find it hard to imagine much commercial success for 1553B, considering its relatively low (1 mbit/sec) signaling rate, limited addressability (just 30 addressable slave nodes), and centralized control.