A Top Down Approach to Add Hot-Pluggable Asynchronous Devices to RAPIEnet Infrastructure

This paper presents a new approach to add asynchronous sending devices like Laptops or Personal Computers to the RAPIEnet (Real-time Automation Protocol for Industrial Ethernet) network without affecting the real-time performance. As a research result in formal modeling, the authors present a way to generate bipartite conflict graphs out of a given network infrastructure and communication requests of the devices. This graph can be colored in polynomial time, which leads to obtain schedules for each switch to be uploaded offline. Then they will be able to identify empty time slots which can be used to forward nRT traffic of asynchronous devices.