Supporting real-time traffic on Ethernet
Venkatramani, Tzi‐cker Chiueh · 1994
Ethernet has been the dominant local area network architecture in the last decade, and we believe that it will continue to be so because of its cost-effectiveness and the availability of higher-bandwidth Ethernets. We propose and evaluate a software-based protocol called RETHER (Real-time ETHERnet) that provider real-time performance guarantees to multimedia applications without modifying existing Ethernet hardware. RETHER features a hybrid mode of operation to reduce the performance impact on non-real-time network packets, a race-condition-free distributed admission control mechanism, and an efficient token-passing scheme that protects the network against token loss due to node failures.>