Message routing in multi-segment FTT networks: the isochronous approach

Summary form only given. Real-time distributed application complexity is steadily increasing. A well-known technique used to manage such complexity consists of decomposing the whole system into different quasiindependent distributed subsystems. Inter-subsystem communication, when necessary, is performed via gateway nodes that filter ingoing and outgoing traffic. For real-time systems, this architecture poses additional design challenges, since it becomes necessary to consider both intra and inter-network message exchanges with real-time constraints. The FTT communication paradigm has been provided with tools for supporting flexible real-time communication on isolated networks. We present an approach to incorporate multisegment support into the FTT protocol family. Two approaches are presented, analyzed and compared, which allow breaking end-to-end deadlines into parameters that are local to each one of the interconnected networks.