Portable real-time protocols to make real-time communications affordable

The cost and capabilities of networking technology is rapidly improving. As a result, the world is rapidly becoming networked for virtually every application. As networking becomes more important, there is a growing corresponding demand for networks to support real-time applications. Current planning for future military engagement networks serves as an example. Taking advantage of the new communications technology involves both technical and economic issues. Economic issues will slow the pace of network deployment especially for real-time systems. This paper offers a solution to make real-time communications affordable. For the purpose of this presentation we describe real-time applications as applications that have demanding performance requirements. This includes applications where timeline requirements must be predictable (deterministic) particularly those that "require" rapid response to an input, those that are safety critical, those that require a high degree of fault tolerance, those that ensure quality of service, and those with custom security considerations. The deterministic requirements of real-time software are generally categorized as applications that must meet deadlines most of the time (soft real-time) or 100 percent of the time within human and hardware limitations (hard real-time). The bottom line is that real-time is not defined as highest speed but rather on predictability within defined timing limits.