Separation of Circulating Tokens

Self-stabilizing distributed control is often modeled by token abstractions. A system with a single token may implement mutual exclusion; a system with multiple tokens may ensure that immediate neighbors do not simultaneously enjoy a privilege. For a cyber-physical system, tokens may represent physical objects whose movement is controlled. The problem studied in this paper is to ensure that a synchronous system with m circulating tokens has at least d distance between tokens. This problem is first considered in a ring where d is given whilst m and the ring size n are unknown. The protocol solving this problem can be uniform, with all processes running the same program, or it can be non-uniform, with some processes acting only as token relays. The protocol for this first problem is simple, and can be expressed with Petri net formalism. A second problem is to maximize d when m is given, and n is unknown. For the second problem, the paper presents a non-uniform protocol with a single corrective process.Comment: 22 pages, 7 figures, epsf and pstricks in LaTe

Modeling of the Space Station Freedom data management system

The Data Management System (DMS) is the information and communications system onboard Space Station Freedom (SSF). Extensive modeling of the DMS is being conducted throughout NASA to aid in the design and development of this vital system. Activities discussed at NASA Ames Research Center to model the DMS network infrastructure are discussed with focus on the modeling of the Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) token-ring protocol and experimental testbedding of networking aspects of the DMS

Performance issues in management of the Space Station Information System

The onboard segment of the Space Station Information System (SSIS), called the Data Management System (DMS), will consist of a Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) token-ring network. The performance of the DMS in scenarios involving two kinds of network management is analyzed. In the first scenario, how the transmission of routine management messages impacts performance of the DMS is examined. In the second scenario, techniques for ensuring low latency of real-time control messages in an emergency are examined

FTT-Ethernet: A Flexible Real-Time Communication Protocol that Supports Dynamic QoS Management on Ethernet-based Systems

Ethernet was not originally developed to meet the requirements of real-time industrial automation systems and it was commonly considered unsuited for applications at the field level. Hence, several techniques were developed to make this protocol exhibit real-time behavior, some of them requiring specialized hardware, others providing soft-real-time guarantees only, or others achieving hard real-time guarantees with different levels of bandwidth efficiency. More recently, there has been an effort to support quality-of-service (QoS) negotiation and enforcement but there is not yet an Ethernet-based data link protocol capable of providing dynamic QoS management to further exploit the variable requirements of dynamic applications. This paper presents the FTT-Ethernet protocol, which efficiently supports hard-real-time operation in a flexible way, seamlessly over shared or switched Ethernet. The FTT-Ethernet protocol employs an efficient master/multislave transmission control technique and combines online scheduling with online admission control, to guarantee continued real-time operation under dynamic communication requirements, together with data structures and mechanisms that are tailored to support dynamic QoS management. The paper includes a sample application, aiming at the management of video streams, which highlights the protocol’s ability to support dynamic QoS management with real-time guarantees

Spacelab system analysis: A study of the Marshall Avionics System Testbed (MAST)

An analysis of the Marshall Avionics Systems Testbed (MAST) communications requirements is presented. The average offered load for typical nodes is estimated. Suitable local area networks are determined

Spacelab system analysis: A study of communications systems for advanced launch systems

An analysis of the required performance of internal avionics data bases for future launch vehicles is presented. Suitable local area networks that can service these requirements are determined

Design and Analysis of RT-Ring: A Protocol for Supporting Real-Time Communications

Distributed applications with quality of service (QoS) requirements are more and more used in several areas (e.g., automated factory networks, embedded systems, conferencing systems). These applications produce a type of traffic with hard timing requirements, i.e., transmissions must be completed within specified deadlines. To handle these transmissions, the communication system must use real-time protocols to provide a communication service that is able to satisfy the QoS requirements of the distributed applications. In this paper, we propose a new real-time protocol, called RT-Ring, able to support transmissions of both real-time and generic traffic over a ring network. RT-Ring provides both network guarantees and high network resource utilization, while ensuring the compatibility with the emerging differentiated service architectures. Network guarantees are fully proved and high network utilization is highlighted by a comparative study with the FDDI protocol. This comparison shows that RT-Ring network capacities are greater than the corresponding FDDI capacities. In fact, by assuming the FDDI frames with a length equal to the RT-Ring slot size and by using the same traffic load we show that the capacities of FDDI are equal to the lower bound capacities of RT-Ring. Index Terms Real-time protocol, quality of service (QoS) traffic, worst case analysis

An optimal synchronous bandwidth allocation scheme for guaranteeing synchronous message deadlines with the timed-token MAC protocol

This paper investigates the inherent timing properties of the timed-token medium access control (MAC) protocol necessary to guarantee synchronous message deadlines in a timed token ring network such as, fiber distributed data interface (FDDI), where the timed-token MAC protocol is employed. As a result, an exact upper bound, tighter than previously published, on the elapse time between any number of successive token arrivals at a particular node has been derived. Based on the exact protocol timing property, an optimal synchronous bandwidth allocation (SBA) scheme named enhanced MCA (EMCA) for guaranteeing synchronous messages with deadlines equal to periods in length is proposed. Thm scheme is an enhancement on the previously publiibed MCA scheme

LANSIM and its applications to distributed EMS

Distributed energy management systems (EMS) open up a host of alternative design options. Simulation plays an important role in evaluating performance and in comparing alternative designs. Currently all the proposed distributed EMSs are local area network (LAN)-based. A LAN simulator, LANSIM, has been developed. To illustrate the application of LANSIM, comparisons are made with different distributed EMS configurations, different LAN technologies (Ethernet and FDDI), and different Ethernet implementations.published_or_final_versio