The Design and Implementation of a Simulator for Switched Ethernet Networks*

In the context of Switched Ethernet, the Flexible Time-Triggered Switched Ethernet protocol (FTT-SE) was proposed to overcome the limitations and related problems of using COTS switches in real-time networks, such as overflow of switch queues due to uncontrolled arrival of packets. Although the FTT-SE protocol has been validated by several experiments on real applications, evaluation of different architectures as well as evaluation of large scale networks is not straightforward. Therefore, a simulator to evaluate different network architectures based on the FTT-SE protocol is useful. In this paper we present such a simulator. We address the extended FTT-SE protocol using multiple switches and we present a modular simulator based on Simulink/Matlab that allows us to visualize message transmissions and to evaluate end-to-end delay bounds of messages.