Hardware Acceleration for Verifiable, Adaptive Real-Time Communication

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 a large number of appliances and network components and represents a natural fit for real-time application. Unfortunately, standard Ethernet provides no bounded communication delays. Network Code Processor is a soft processor implementation for real-time communication on Ethernet. The system provides a smart network-card functionality and can be seen as a co-processor for time-triggered communication. Its most distinguishing feature, the programmability of the processor via the Network Code language, allows developers to write adaptive but verifiable communication schedules tailored to the application needs. In this work we present results around the development of the soft processor, discuss the specific challenges of how to build a reliable and fast communication system, the tradeoffs involved when moving from a generic software prototype to a programmable hardware implementation.