Holistic schedulability analysis for multipacket messages in AFDX networks

Abstract

The ARINC-664, Part 7 (AFDX) standard defines a communication network based on Ethernet and the UDP/IP protocols. Contrary to general-purpose Ethernet, the timing behavior in AFDX is deterministic due to the use of special network switches and end systems with static routing tables and traffic policing at the sending end through mechanisms called virtual links. Even though the latencies in this network are bounded, there are scheduling and contention effects that need to be analyzed. In this paper we develop a response-time analysis for multipacket messages transmitted through an AFDX network including the scheduling of the virtual links and sub-virtual links, and also the contention in the end systems and in the switches. This analysis allows us to obtain worst-case latencies and output jitter for the network messages with a precise modeling of the sending and receiving ends. These results can be integrated in a holistic approach with the response time analysis of the threads in the processing nodes to obtain end-to-end response times in heterogeneous distributed systems.