Table driven proportional access based real-time Ethernet for safety-critical real-time systems

Ethernet technology has received much attention in embedded system industries because of its cost efficiency, high availability, and popularity. This trend is not an exception even in safety critical real-time systems such as integrated modular avionics systems. To overcome the lack of deterministic characteristics in the Ethernet protocol, we propose a software-oriented approach based on table-driven proportional access. In addition to the protocol details, performance and schedulability analyses, as well as a prototype platform, are described.