Performance measurements of a communication protocol implemented for distributed real-time systems

Presents a study, including experiments and analysis, of the performance of a communication protocol for transmitting time-constrained messages in a time-division multiple-access local area network. The measurements of the performance of the communication protocol are made as a function of message length and workload, using different configurations in a well-controlled environment. The measurements are carried out in real time in a 2.5 Mb/s LAN. The contributions of the protocol to the performance of the network could be separately extracted, thus allowing for a detailed analysis of the protocol efficiency. The communication protocol exploits the bandwidth of the medium efficiently by explicitly passing the `mastership´ between stations