Integrating Dynamic-TDMA Communication Channels into COTS Ethernet Networks

Real-time Ethernet is widely recognized for its potential to provide a unified communication backbone for nextgeneration highly-heterogeneous distributed systems. However, most of the research in the area has traditionally focused on formal models and analyzes and tends to omit the associated implementation challenges. This gap between theory and practice prevents practical validation of the claimed properties, which in turn hinders the pace of innovation, development of new standards, and adoption of the technology in industrial settings. This paper aims at narrowing the existing gap by characterizing a comprehensive open-source framework that explores emerging challenges in real-time networking, including the provision of ultra-low latency and jitter, dynamic bandwidth management, and segmentation within large networks. This work integrates research on formal abstractions for dynamic-TDMA arbitration and technological insights from modern hardware infrastructure, and uses a representative distributed video processing casestudy to provide experimental and reproducible evidence of the achieved properties in multi-hop Ethernet settings. By leveraging readily available technology and an open-source design, the proposed framework facilitates further exploration and experimental testing and validation of properties that are beyond the scope of current commercial technologies, encouraging evidencebased discussions to accelerate development and adoption of nextgeneration standards for industrial networking.