HaRTKad: A hard real-time Kademlia approach

The Internet of Things is becoming more and more relevant in industrial environments. As the industry itself has different requirements like (hard) real-time behavior for many scenarios, different solutions are needed to fulfill future challenges. Common Industrial Ethernet solution often leak scalability, flexibility, and robustness. Most realizations also require special hardware to guarantee a hard real-time behavior. Therefore, an approach is presented to realize a hard realtime network for automation scenarios using Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technology. Kad as implementation variant of the structured decentralized P2P protocol Kademlia has been chosen as base for the realization. As Kad is not suitable for hard real-time applications per se, changes of the protocol are necessary. Thus, Kad is extended by a TDMA-based mechanism. Additionally, to evaluate the performance an prototype is presented, which is realized on an embedded platform with a real-time operating system. Thereby, with the presented approach and a realized prototype it is possible to investigate the performance of a Kad network with hard real-time capabilities.