Development of an Ethernet protocol for industrial real-time communications

This paper provides an Ethernet protocol to support traffic with industrial real-time applications over non-real-time LAN technology, without loss of generality to use common protocol suites like TCP/IP. Real-time communication is handled in the nodes and the switch, by software added between the network layer and the data link layer. Support for real-time communication is made by dynamically setting up real-time channels.