Scheduling in a time-triggered protocol with dynamic arbitration
Jens Chr. Lisner · 2005
Tea is a time-triggered protocol which provides the ability to allocate senders dynamically for parts of the communication cycle in a fault-tolerant way (see (12)) during runtime. Using a special architecture for the nodes it is possible to protect channels against the babbling idiot ((1), (2), (11), (17), (18)) failure, where a faulty communication controller can send signals randomly to the channels. This architecture provides also the ability to use slots of dynamic length which allows efficient use the extension part of the communication cycle (see (13)). For this purpose it is necessary to agree on a schedule for the chosen senders in the current cycle. This paper will present a scheduling algorithm which is flexible enough to follow typical strategies like priority, FIFO- or round-robin in a fault-tolerant way. By reducing the need for register capacity to an absolute minimum, the hardware costs will be as low as possible.