IMPROVING REAL-TIME BEHAVIOR OF ETHERNET SWITCHES USING FUZZY TRAFFIC SMOOTHING

Previous work has shown that adaptive traffic smoothing can be successfully applied to a Shared Ethernet to enable it to support statistical real-time communication at the Field level. This paper addresses the case for fuzzy traffic smoothing to realize a tradeoff between bounded delivery times for soft real-time packets and throughput for non real-time traffic over non-microsegmented Switched Ethernet networks. The paper proposes an optimization technique, based on the use of multiobjective optimization, to tune the parameters of the fuzzy controller and discusses the implementation of the optimized fuzzy smoother in a real scenario, also giving comparative performance assessments.