Performance analysis of master-slave multi-hop switched ethernet networks

There is an increasing trend towards using switched Ethernet in real-time distributed systems due to features like absence of collisions and high throughput. Nevertheless, a few problems persist, in particular related to priority inversion and limited length in queues. In this paper we focus on a protocol which uses a master-slave technique over standard switched Ethernet in order to overcome such problems, namely the FTT-SE protocol. We present an improved response time analysis for such a network and we compare, analytically and with simulations, the results achieved with Network Calculus on a worst-case scenario. We show that our proposed response time analysis gives tighter bounds compared to Network Calculus. Moreover, we compare the performance of different solutions to scale the FTTSE protocol with respect to the bandwidth utilization. Finally, we propose a new architecture to improve the average performance of master-slave switched Ethernet networks.