Actor-oriented Modeling und Simulation of Cut-through Communication in Network Controllers

In many networked embedded systems, crucial factors for correct functionality are the network’s real-time capability, determinism, and reliability. Besides these requirements, a high network performance in terms of throughput and latency is desired. One of the applied techniques to improve performance is cut-through communication. It allows to forward messages as soon as the packet header is processed, decreasing latency in the controller and, hence, increasing throughput of the overall network. This technique, however, is not directly supported by state-of-the-art ESL actor-oriented modeling approaches. These and their underlying formal models typically rely on FIFO-based communication which corresponds to a storeand-forward communication paradigm. In this paper, we propose and evaluate approaches to extend actor-oriented modeling and simulation to consider cut-through communication in network controllers. Based on the Ethernet variant PROFINET from the industrial automation domain, we evaluate the proposed techniques regarding modeling effort and accuracy compared to standard store-and-forward modeling.