Estimating Delays in Switched Ethernet Networks on board of Aerospace Vehicles

Abstract

Since the year 2000, several studies on bounding end-to-end delays in switched Ethernet topologies required in the design of distributed processing systems on board of aerospace vehicles were made public. These studies presented various approaches for dealing with the non-deterministic behavior of non-synchronized network traffic while striving to avoid overestimation. One of them described an effect observed in frame-based network transmissions and named it “serialization”. This effect is used in this paper with the objective of constructing a new low-complexity method for estimating the worst case delay experienced by a frame crossing a switched Ethernet. This method results from the combination of two new propositions which inherit concepts originally formulated by schedulability analysis methods for multitask processing systems. Its implementation is shown on a case study using a step-by-step procedure and the results obtained are favorably compared with one previously published work.