Designing a costumized Ethernet switch for safe hard real-time communication

The use of switched Ethernet for precise and safe real-time communication still suffers from undesired phenomena that range from the blocking caused by long non-preemptive frames to lack of protection against errors in the time domain and also couplings across virtual LANs and even priority levels via internal switch shared resources. In this paper we propose a novel switch architecture enhanced with resource reservation mechanisms, based on the Flexible Time-Triggered paradigm, which enforces strict service differentiation, blocking-free forwarding and timing errors confinement. Experimental results of a preliminary 4-port prototype based on an FPGA validate the desired properties and exhibit the potential of the enhanced Ethernet switch.