Adding Contract-Based Reservation Services to a Hard Real-Time Ethernet Protocol

This paper presents the implementation of DFSF, a contract based framework for flexible scheduling in real-time networks. The initial implementation of DFSF provides the ability to make dynamic bandwidth reservations using a distributed acceptance test that ensures the overall network schedulability. It has been implemented using the Real-Time Ethernet Protocol (RT-EP), which is a software-based token-passing Ethernet protocol for real-time applications, that does not require any modification to existing Ethernet hardware.