Scheduling Support for Hard Real-Time Ethernet Networking

Previous results on traffic shaping on Switched Ethernet technology have demonstrated its practicability and effectiveness for hard real-time communication. With nodes dedicated to communication the application-to-application delays on a 5-node network were reported to be less than a millisecond with both Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet technology with a link utilization of 93% and 49%. This paper extends the work and analyzes the network performance that can be achieved on complex systems where resources for the network management are restricted by other real-time tasks.