Dual-level traffic smoothing technique over switched ethernet for hard real-time communication

Abstract

This paper introduces a novel dual-level traffic smoothing technique for hard real-time communication over Fast/Gigabit switched Ethernet without any modification to existing Ethernet hardware. First, the necessary restricted conditions for hard real-time communication over switched Ethernet are analyzed using the network calculus theory. Then the dual-level traffic smoothing scheme, which combines the node-level traffic smoothing with the global-level traffic smoothing, is introduced. Finally, we make thorough measurements and the results show that the dual-level traffic smoothing mechanism can provide very good hard real-time communication performance with low system overheads and has more potential for most hard real-time and embedded control systems than other existing approaches. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.