Abstract
The switched Ethernet has many features for real-time communications such as providing traffic isolation, large bandwidth, and full-duplex links, and so on. The switched Ethernet, however, cannot guarantee the timely delivery of a real-time message because message delay increases when collisions occurs at the output ports and message loss can even occur due to the overflow at the output buffer. Recently, many research efforts have been done to use the switched Ethernet as an industrial control network. In the industrial control network, sensors periodically sense the physical environment and transmit the sensed data to an actuator, and the periodic messages from sensors to actuators have typically real-time requirements such that those messages must be transmitted within their deadlines. This paper first suggests a feasible condition for EDF (Earliest Deadline First)-based scheduling of periodic messages on a synchronized switched Ethernet and a message scheduling algorithm which satisfies the proposed feasible condition. Pedreiras, et al. [10] suggested a feasible condition for message scheduling on the Ethernet (shared media Ethernet), but there has been no research result on the scheduling condition on the switched Ethernet until now. We compared the real-time message scheduling capacity between the Ethernet and the switched Ethernet by simulation. The simulation result shows that the message scheduling capacity of the Ethernet has almost remained constant as the number of nodes on the network increases, but, in the case of the switched Ethernet, the message scheduling capacity has increased linearly according to the number of nodes on the network.
