Real-time enabled debugging for distributed systems

The distribution of real-time tasks in a networked environment in principle has several advantages, above all a high degree of flexibility easing system extension and replacement of devices and components. Component-oriented system design concepts and suitable networks such as Ethernet additionally facilitate distributed automation applications. Yet, really distributed systems are problematic to apply in practice as debugging capabilities are limited. One essential prerequisite is that network traffic can be monitored in real-time with respect to its timing within the entire system, so that events can be ordered and their interplay analysed. This paper proposes a novel distributed measurement and debugging concept for embedded systems where tracing facilities are directly integrated into the network nodes so as to enable and ease failure analysis and detection on all protocol layers.