Worst-Case Delay Analysis of Master-Slave Switched Ethernet Networks

Abstract

Switched Ethernet is increasingly used in real-time communication due to its intrinsic features such as micro segmentation and high throughput. However, COTS switches may impose long blocking times due to their FIFO queues and can also experience buffer over ow in outgoing queues due to uncontrolled packets arrival. Reconciling the use of ordinary switches with the needs of real-time communication requires an adequate overlay protocol. In this paper we focus on using a Master-Slave technique to overcome the COTS switch limitations in real-time applications, namely the FTT-SE protocol. We extend the protocol for large scale networks and we present the worst-case delay analysis using the Network Calculus formalism for such a network. Moreover, we assess the end-to-end delay of traffc with simulation.