Wireless Time-Triggered Real-Time Communication

Due to the increasing demand for mobility in the area of distributed systems, the use of wireless communication gains in importance. We present a wireless real-time communication protocol for the interconnection of several possibly mobile fieldbus clusters. The protocol is based on the time-triggered paradigm. A single dedicated master node is used to keep the clocks of all slaves synchronized, thus establishing a global time among all communication participants. To enhance dependability, the clock synchronization algorithm is designed to tolerate certain transient fail-silent failures of the master as well as the communication channel and permanent fail-silent behavior of up to ns 2 communication links, where ns describes the number of slaves in the system. The paper presents a case study implementation, that shows the usability of the introduced protocol with commercial off-the-shelf components.