Reliable hard real-time communication in industrial and embedded systems

This paper presents a framework for how to use ARQ (automatic repeat request) in combination with real-time worst-case scheduling analysis to be able to support reliable hard real-time communication. We show how to handle retransmissions of erroneous data packets, while still not jeopardizing stated delay guarantees of other packets. We demonstrate this by taking a point-to-point link as an example. Through our simulation studies we have shown that a reduction of the message error rate by several orders of magnitude is possible with a reasonable utilization penalty.