Hierarchical server-based communication with switched Ethernet

Server-based architectures have recently generated more interests and are currently considered for usage for communication in networks. In parallel, switched Ethernet technology has been widely adopted and used in lots of networked systems. Current requirements of networks for supporting real-time guarantees while being flexible at the same time have made the network designers to consider addition of some features to common switches. The FTT-Enabled Ethernet switch is a switch that has been developed to support the FTT (Flexible Time Triggered) paradigm. Recently, servers have been added in these types of switches in order to efficiently manage their allocated bandwidth to different types of messages. A hierarchical network of Ethernet switches might be designed in different ways according to the overall goals and properties of the network. In this thesis, after a study on different design solutions, an architecture has been proposed based on FTT-enabled switches, motivated by their support of real-time constraints and server-based communication features. After having created the architecture, a protocol for bandwidth reservation for this hierarchically composed Ethernet switch architecture is developed. Behavior of the designed protocol is described in detail and it has been modeled using Uppaal. Moreover, the temporal behavior (timing) of the network is presented. The first part of the thesis gives a description of the problem formulation, followed by an overview of related works. Possible architectures for designing a hierarchical network are discussed in Chapter 3. Solutions to the problem, behavior of the proposed protocol, and its model are presented in Chapter 4. Timing analysis of the designed protocol is presented in Chapter 5. Finally summary, conclusions and future works conclude the thesis.