Evaluation of Flexilink as Deterministic Unified Real-Time Protocol for Industrial Networks
Tianao Ma, Wei Hu, Yonghao Wang, Dalia El-Banna, John Grant, Hongjun Dai · 2018
The QoS of real-time network based on the traditional TCP/IP architecture is always perceived as a dilemma. The current real-time network design is trade-off between different network performances such as delay, packet loss, and trans-mission speed. We believe the traditional network architecture becomes a barrier of deterministic network performance. Time deterministic networking is demanded by some applications such as industrial control network, aviation, and interactive multime-dia. In addition, it is important to guarantee the data integrity and timing accuracy even when the network is congested. This paper proposed a scheduling model for Flexilink which is a newly proposed dynamic TDM network protocol and architecture that is approved to be secure and stable. We compared proposed scheduling algorithm for Flexilink in comparison with classic best effort network and priority based network using simulation. The experiments results show that the proposed scheduling algorithm performs very stable even when the network is heavily loaded.