Fault-tolerant real-time communication in distributed computing systems

The delivery delay in a point-to-point packet switching network is difficult to control due to the contention among randomly-arriving packets at each node and multihops a packet must travel between its source and destination. Despite this difficulty, there are an increasing number of applications that require packets to be delivered reliably within prespecified delay bounds. This paper shows how this can be achieved by using real-time channels which make “soft” reservation of network resources to ensure the timely delivery of real-time packets. We first present theoretical results and detailed procedures for the establishment of real-time channels and then show how the basic real-time channels can be enhanced to be fault-tolerant using the multiple disjoint paths between a pair of communicating nodes. The contribution of the former is a tighter schedulability condition which makes more efficient use of network resources than any other existing approaches, and that of the latter is a significant improvement in fault tolerance over the basic real-time channel, which is inherently susceptible to component failures