Enhanced Ethernet Switching for Flexible Hard Real-Time Communication

Switched Ethernet arose in the last decade as a means to increase global throughput with parallel switching paths, segment the network and create isolated collision domains, thus reducing the non-determinism of the original shared Ethernet. However the services provided by COTS Ethernet switches are not enough to guarantee real-time communication, which lead to the development of several switch Ethernet-based protocols, among which the recently proposed FTT-SE. This paper proposes moving the FTT traffic management into the Ethernet switch and discusses how this architectural change enhances the performance of the transmission control and service differentiation mechanisms as well as how error confinement mechanisms can be efficiently deployed. Preliminary experimental results from a prototype implementation validate the services provided by the enhanced Ethernet switch framework.