Deterministic Integration of Hard and Soft Real-Time Communication over Shared-Ethernet

This paper presents a protocol proposal that makes Ethernet suitable for supporting modern real-time systems. Applications that could benefit from the proposed protocol are mainly those composed of heterogeneous distributed components, which are specified in terms of both hard and soft timing constraints. Indeed, using the proposed protocol, hard and soft real-time tasks can efficiently and predictably share an Ethernet bus. The bus utilization can be optimized by an appropriate allocation of the available bandwidth into hard and soft communication. Moreover, the protocol, compatible with standard Ethernet hardware, can implement a decentralized medium access control, increasing communication flexibility and reliability.