A Switch Design for Real-Time Industrial Networks

The convergence of computers and the physical world is the theme for next generation networking research. This trend calls for real-time network infrastructure, which requires a high-speed real-time WAN to serve as its backbone. However, commercially available high-speed WAN switches (routers) are designed for best-effort Internet traffic. A real-time switch design for the aforementioned networks is missing. We propose a real-time switch design using a crossbar switching fabric. The proposed switch can be implemented by making minimal modification, or even simplification, to the widely implemented iSLIP crossbar switch scheduler. Our real-time switch serves periodic and aperiodic traffic with real-time virtual machine tasks, which simplifies analysis, provides isolation, and facilitates future hierarchical scheduling and flow aggregation. Taking advantage of the fact that most industrial real-time network flows rarely change, our switch is better adapted to providing high bandw...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: RTAS
• Authors: Qixin Wang, Sathish Gopalakrishnan, Xue Liu, Lui Sha
• Keywords: Real-time Network, Real-time Switch, Real-time Switch Design, Real-Time Technology, RTAS 2008