Statistical Real-Time Communication over Ethernet for Manufacturing Automation Systems

In order to realize real-time communication over Ethernet or fast Ethernet, one must be able to bound the medium access time within an acceptable limit. The multiple access nature of an Ethernet makes it impossible to guarantee a deterministic medium access time (hence packet delivery deadlines) to individual stations. However, one can bound the medium access time statistically by limiting the packet arrival rate at the medium access control (MAC) layer. While focusing on automated manufacturing systems as the main application, this paper considers the connection admission control (CAC) problem for statistically bounding the medium access time of Ethernet. Specifically, a packet is guaranteed to have a medium access time smaller than a predefined bound with a certain probability if the instantaneous packet arrival rate is kept below a certain threshold. Through an analysis, we first derived such a threshold. In order to keep the packet arrival rate under the given threshold, we employ a traffic smoother which (i) is located between the transport layer and the Ethernet datalink layer and (ii) smooths packet streams between the two layers. The implementation of this traffic smoother requires only a minimal change in the OS kernel without any modification to the current standard of Ethernet MAC protocol or TCP or UDP/IP stack. In order to solve the CAC problem, we derived the probability of transmitting a packet successfully upon each trial by modeling the MAC protocol, 1-persistent CSMA/CD, and the collision resolution protocol, Binary Exponential Backoff, of Ethernet. We implemented a traffic smoother on the Linux OS, experimentally demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach in providing real-time communication over Ethernet. Index Terms — 1-persistent CSMA/CD, (Fast) Ethernet, Binary Exponential Backoff, real-time communication, statistical guarantees. The work reported in this paper was supported in part by Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory, Cambridge, MA and by the Office of Naval Research under Grant N00014-94-1-0229.