Hardware Implementation of the Time-Triggered Ethernet Controller

Time-triggered (TT) Ethernet is a novel communication system that integrates real-time and non-real-time traffic into a single communication architecture. A TT Ethernet system consists od a set of nodes interconnected by a specific switch called TT Ethernet switch. A node consist of a TT Ethernet communication controller that executes the TT Ethernet protocol and a host computer that executes the user application. The protocol distinguishes between event-triggered (ET) and time-triggered (TT) Ethernet traffic. Time-triggered traffic is scheduled and transmitted with a predictable transmission delay, whereas event-triggered traffic is transmitted on a best-effort basis. The event-triggered traffic in TT Ethernet is handled in conformance with the existing Ethernet standards of the IEEE. This paper presents the design of the TT Ethernet communication controller optimized to be implemented in hardware. The paper describes a prototypical implementation using a custom built hardware platform and presents the results of evaluation experiments.