Performance evaluation of RTnet based communication for distributed control system

The aim of this work is to evaluate RTnet which is an open source hard real-time network protocol stack for the deterministic behaviour in a Distributed Control System environment. RTnet being a hard real-time network protocol stack introduces a hardware independent and flexible communication in the real time context. Linux with hard real time extensions such as Xenomai supports RTnet for deterministic communication. Since RTnet is a compatible and extensible framework for deterministic communication over standard Ethernet, aims in real time compliance without specific hardware support compiles the use of it in the distributed control system, where real time communication is key component of the distributed control system. In this work, various experiments are conducted to evaluate the RTnet performance in a Distributed Real Time System based on Xenomai. Experiments are conducted with distributed control system with redundancy management at each level of data validation which is received via Ethernet communication using RTnet based timer trigger from the RTOS. Low latencies, jitter and Ethernet packet traffic carefully handled in closed loop redundancy model of Distributed control system. The performance evaluation is conducted to understand the time taken for transmission for different payload, transmission mode, different time intervals and burning test. And the experimental results are discussed in detail.