Confronting the performances of a switched Ethernet network with industrial constraints by using the network calculus: Research Articles

The Ethernet network is more and more used to interconnect industrial devices. The objective of this paper is to study the performances of such a network to support real-time communications. For this, first we propose a general representation to model a switched Ethernet network by using a sequence of elementary components such as buffers, multiplexers, etc. Second, we aggregate the individual temporal properties of each component given in the Cruz' survey to obtain a global formula enabling one to calculate the maximum end-to-end delay for any industrial communication scenarios. Finally, we deduce the limits of the switched Ethernet network regarding the number of input/output cards connected to the network and to the sizes of periodic and aperiodic messages. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.