Hardware Acceleration for Conditional State-Based Communication Scheduling on Real-Time Ethernet
Penn collection
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local area networks
microprocessor chips
scheduling
software prototyping
commodity network
conditional state-based communication scheduling
distributed real-time applications
hardware acceleration
real-time Ethernet
software prototypes
synthesized soft processor
Networks
programmable hardware
real-time systems
time-division multiaccess
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Abstract
Distributed real-time applications implement distributed applications with timeliness requirements. Such systems require a deterministic communication medium with bounded communication delays. Ethernet is a widely used commodity network with many appliances and network components and represents a natural fit for real-time application; unfortunately, standard Ethernet provides no bounded communication delays. Conditional state-based communication schedules provide expressive means for specifying and executing with choice points, while staying verifiable. Such schedules implement an arbitration scheme and provide the developer with means to fit the arbitration scheme to the application demands instead of requiring the developer to tweak the application to fit a predefined scheme. An evaluation of this approach as software prototypes showed that jitter and execution overhead may diminish the gains. This work successfully addresses this problem with a synthesized soft processor. We present results around the development of the soft processor, the design choices, and the measurements on throughput and robustness.