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

Flexible time-triggered protocol for CAN: new scheduling and dispatching solutions

One of the possibilities to build robust communication systems with respect to their temporal behaviour is to use autonomous control based on the time-triggered paradigm. The FTT-CAN - flexible time-triggered protocol, relies on centralised scheduling but makes use of the CAN native distributed arbitration to reduce communication overhead. There, a planning scheduler is used within a master node to reduce the scheduling run-time overhead. On-line changes to the communication requirements can then be made under guaranteed timeliness. In addition FTT-CAN also allows an efficient combination of both time-triggered and event- triggered traffic with temporal isolation. In this paper, recent evolutions of the initial protocol definition concerning transmission of synchronous and asynchronous messages are presented. These consist in a time division of the elementary transmission window which optimises the available bandwidth for asynchronous messages, keeping the timeliness of synchronous messages without jeopardising their transmission jitter. A novel solution for the planning scheduler is also presented. It consists in an FPGA-based coprocessor which implements the planning scheduler technique without imposing overhead to the arbiter CPU. With it, it is possible to reduce strongly the plan duration thus allowing on-line admission demanded by system elements and, also, to extend the protocol application to high-speed networks

SheepIT, an E-Shepherd System for Weed Control in Vineyards: Experimental Results and Lessons Learned

Weed control in vineyards demands regular interventions that currently consist of the use of machinery, such as plows and brush-cutters, and the application of herbicides. These methods have several drawbacks, including cost, chemical pollution, and the emission of greenhouse gases. The use of animals to weed vineyards, usually ovines, is an ancestral, environmentally friendly, and sustainable practice that was abandoned because of the scarcity and cost of shepherds, which were essential for preventing animals from damaging the vines and grapes. The SheepIT project was developed to automate the role of human shepherds, by monitoring and conditioning the behaviour of grazing animals. Additionally, the data collected in real-time can be used for improving the efficiency of the whole process, e.g., by detecting abnormal situations such as health conditions or attacks and manage the weeding areas. This paper presents a comprehensive set of field-test results, obtained with the SheepIT infrastructure, addressing several dimensions, from the animals’ well-being and their impact on the cultures, to technical aspects, such as system autonomy. The results show that the core objectives of the project have been attained and that it is feasible to use this system, at an industrial scale, in vineyards.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

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Online QoS management for multimedia real-time transmission in industrial networks

“© © 20xx IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.”A growing number of industrial applications incorporate multimedia information processing. These multimedia applications are commonly distributed and subject to time constraints that must be met across networks without creating intolerable interference over typical control flows. However, multimedia traffic, in general, and video streaming, in particular, have specific characteristics that conflict with the operational framework of conventional real-time protocols. In particular, video compressors generate highly variable bit-rate streams that mismatch the constant-bit-rate channels typically provided by real-time protocols, severely reducing the efficiency of network utilization. This paper focuses on low-latency multimedia transmission over Ethernet with dynamic quality-of-service (QoS) management. We propose a multidimensional mechanism that controls, in an integrated way, both the compression parameters and the network bandwidth allocated to each stream. The goal is to provide the best possible QoS to each stream, recomputing the compression levels and network bandwidth whenever significant events, such as channel setup/teardown, or structural changes happen. This paper also presents novel QoS metrics based both on the image quality and network parameters. Several experiments with prerecorded video streams illustrate the advantages of the proposed approach and the convenience of the metrics. © 2010 IEEE.Manuscript received August 14, 2009; revised November 2, 2009 and February 27, 2010; accepted April 9, 2010. Date of publication May 10, 2010; date of current version February 11, 2011. This work was supported in part by the Ministery of Science and Technology of Spain under Project TSI2007-66637-C02-02, by the iLAND Project (call 2008-1 of the European Union ARTEMIS Joint Undertaking Program), by the European Community through the ICT NoE 214373 ArtistDesign, and by the Portuguese Government through the FCT Project HaRTES (PTDC/EEA-ACR/73307/2006).Silvestre-Blanes, J.; Almeida, L.; Marau, R.; Pedreiras, P. (2011). Online QoS management for multimedia real-time transmission in industrial networks. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics. 58(3):1061-1071. https://doi.org/10.1109/TIE.2010.2049711S1061107158

Response time analysis of multi-hop HaRTES Ethernet switch networks

In this paper we focus on micro-segmented switched-Ethernet networks with HaRTES switches. HaRTES switches provide synchronous and asynchronous real-time traffic scheduling, dynamic Quality-of-Service adaptation and transparent integration of real-time and non-real-time nodes. Herein we investigate the challenges of connecting multiple HaRTES switches in order to build multi-hop communication and we propose a method, named Distributed Global Scheduling, to handle the traffic forwarding in such an architecture while preserving the unique properties of the single HaRTES switch case. Moreover, we develop a response time analysis for the method. We also evaluate the level of pessimism embodied in the anal-ysis. Finally, we show the applicability of the proposed method in an industrial setting by applying it in an automotive case study

Implementing server-based communication within Ethernet switches

Real-Time Ethernet (RTE) protocols have difficulties in attaining a bandwidth efficient support of aperiodic message streams in scenarios where strict timeliness requirements have to be met. To overcome such difficulties, the authors proposed recently the Server-SE protocol that deploys server-based traffic scheduling over switched Ethernet using the FTT-SE protocol and COTS switches as platform. This paper extends such work by proposing a new platform,namely the FTT-Enabled Switch recently developed by the authors. The resulting framework provides a high level of determinism, robustness and flexibility, being particularly suited to open systems as servers can easily be added, composed, adapted and removed at run-time. The framework is validated with a prototype implementation. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the framework in guaranteeing a correct temporal behavior even in the presence of traffic with arbitrary arrival patterns and load variations