Ethernet transport system supporting delay-sensitive real-time traffics

We propose and demonstrate an Ethernet transport system that can support hard real-time traffics with guaranteed throughput and very low jitter performance even in the presence of asynchronous traffics. The superframe structure-based Ethernet system first synchronizes all the nodes in a network by using the IEEE 1588-compliant boundary clock scheme and then reserves the traffic channels for synchronous traffics before accommodating both synchronous and asynchronous traffics in the superframe. Our experimental demonstration performed on field-programmable gate array-enabled Gigabit Ethernet test benches shows that the proposed scheme not only guarantees the throughput of the synchronous frames but also substantially reduces the jitter of the synchronous frames less than 110 ns after seven-hop transmission. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.