AN ETHERNET LAYER FOR SUPPORTING ENHANCED REAL-TIME COMMUNICATION SERVICES

Real-time communication often requires the support of periodic and aperiodic message transmission, precise control of the message transmission instants, message prioritization, bounded latency for processing the incoming messages, etc. Standard Ethernet drivers do not natively support those features, since they are intended for generic data communication aiming to improve average throughput and performance.This paper presents a 2-tier solution that natively takes into account the real-time requirements above described, presenting to the application an hardware independent interface that extends the services supported by standard Ethernet layers to include autonomous periodic transmission with selectable scheduling policy, priority-driven message transmission queues and prioritized message delivery on reception. These services simplify the application development and improve the real-time communication performance. The paper includes a set of experimental results that show the effectiveness of the solution, namely concerning the support for periodic message transmission.