FTT-Ethernet: a platform to implement the Elastic Task Model over message streams

Real-time distributed systems are becoming more pervasive, supporting a broad range of applications such as automotive, adaptive control, robotics, computer vision, and multimedia. Furthermore, in all such applications there is a growing demand for flexibility in order to support dynamic configuration changes such as those arising from evolving requirements and on-line Quality-of-Service management. The elastic task model, proposed previously, is well suited to support that level of flexibility in multitasking systems running on single processors. This paper presents the extension of such model to the network, which runs the FTT-Ethernet protocol. The paper includes a brief presentation of this protocol and of the elastic task model, discusses the referred extension and presents a set of experimental results involving the dynamic adjustment of the quality of service delivered to several message streams, with guaranteed timeliness.