Industrial hard real-time traffic protocol based on switched Ethernet

This paper presents a simple and efficient switched Ethernet communication protocol for industrial hard real-time applications without modifications of the Ethernet hardware. The network is set up with nodes and switch, and establishes a channel within the nodes. Hard real-time communication management is handled by software added between the Ethernet protocols and the TCP/IP suites, and controls the traffic to bypass the TCP/IP stacks. This makes considerably speed up the traffic, and increase the achievable data frame rate.