Pulsed Data Streams

This paper proposes a new communication primitive for distributed embedded control systems: the pulsed data stream. A pulsed data stream is a timetriggered cyclic unidirectional data stream that is transmitted for a short duration at a defined phase of every cycle of a periodic control system. Since the duration of a cycle and the phase and duration of the transmission within each cycle are known a priori, the transmission of pulsed data-streams can be scheduled by the network ahead of their activation in order to minimize the end-to-end latency that is provided to an application. This paper introduces the concept of a pulsed data stream, presents a number of practical examples that demonstrate the utility of pulsed data streams in distributed monitoring and control applications and hints at implementation issues of pulsed data streams in local and wide-area networks.