Network traffic oscillator for safety critical networking

The idea of a network traffic oscillator (NTO) is presented for dynamically adjusting to network conditions so as to ensure the best response time for all safety critical application payloads in a network. The context of the work is airport networking where the desire for greater interconnectivity coupled with Ethernet adoption makes the delivery of real-time deterministic service extremely challenging. The prevailing approach via the Enhanced Interior Gate Routing Protocol (EIGRP) is presented since it finds widespread commercial application for reliable data exchange. However, it still produces great variation in packet delivery times as a result of varying congestion and buffer delays. The NTO matches the transmission rates to the links in the network by its resonant nature an using as routing vector metric. Simulations of a typical airfield network show that the NTO delivers a reduction of over 25% in network response time for radar data transmissions with minimal response time variance. Moreover, only 1% of packets experience problematic transmission delays compared to 10% using EIGRP. The NTO thus offers real-time deterministic Ethernet performance for safety critical applications.