This standard establishes the design requirements for a fiber optic serial interconnect protocol, topology, and media. The application target for this standard is the interconnection of multiple aerospace sensors, processing resources, bulk storage resources and communications resources onboard aerospace platforms. The standard is for subsystem interconnection, as opposed to intra-backplane connection.

The purpose of this standard is the specification of a highly reliable and fault tolerant fiber optic network that is compatible with the harsh thermal, mechanical, and radiation environments of aerospace applications requiring small size and low power dissipation. This standard will specify a node-to-node operating data rate range of 100 Mbps through 2.5 Gbps. The standard will define physical and logical protocol, and sub-network management functions which allow mixing highspeed synchronous and asynchronous distributed access for deterministic communications.