Multi-Dimensional Schedules for Media-Access Control in Time-Triggered Communication

A shared communication medium is characterized by multiple entities that use this medium by reading and writing from and to it. Write operations on the shared communication medium must be coordinated and collision-avoidance schemes are one technique to achieve this - for example time-division multiple access (TDMA). Common solutions for TDMA include descriptive tables or algorithm-based client/server mechanisms. Yet, they are all limited in their expressiveness: at the beginning of the communication period at most one write operation can be scheduled for a specific time slot. In this work, we propose a system that allows for scheduling several write operations for the same time slot but guarantee that at most one will be performed though. It does not deal with scheduling algorithms per se, it deals with describing and implementing a computed schedule. The consequences of this added expressiveness allow for parallel and stateful communication schedules merged and serialized in an ad-hoc way. The contribution is the proposed more expressive yet still value and time-deterministic way of describing communication schedules for time-triggered communication plus a description of its implementation in an interpreter implemented as infrastructure in RTLinuxPro.