Real-Time Communication over Switched Ethernet with Resource Reservation

Sammanfattning: Due to the need for advanced computer-controlled functionality in distributed embedded systems the requirements on network communication are becoming overly intricate. This dissertation targets the requirements that are concerned with real-time guarantees, run-time adaptation, resource utilization and flexibility during the development. The Flexible Time-Triggered Switched Ethernet (FTT-SE) and Hard Real-Time Ethernet Switching (HaRTES) network architectures have emerged as two promising solutions that can cater for these requirements. However, these architectures do not support multi-hop communication as they are originally developed for single-switch networks. This dissertation presents a fundamental contribution in multi-hop real-time communication over the FTT-SE and HaRTES architectures targeting the above mentioned requirements. It proposes and evaluates various solutions for scheduling and forwarding the traffic through multiple switches in these architectures. These solutions preserve the ability of dynamic adaptation without jeopardizing real-time properties of the architectures. Moreover, the dissertation presents schedulability analyses for the timeliness verification and evaluation of the proposed solutions as well as several protocols to support run-time adaptation in the multi-hop communication. Finally, the work led to an end-to-end resource reservation framework, based on the proposed multi-hop architectures, to support flexibility during the development of the systems. The efficiency of the proposed solutions is evaluated on various case studies that are inspired from industrial systems.