Reduced buffering solution for multi-hop HaRTES switched Ethernet networks

In the context of switched Ethernet networks, multi-hop communication is essential as the networks in industrial applications comprise a high amount of nodes, that is far beyond the capability of a single switch. In this paper, we focus on multi-hop communication using HaRTES switches. The HaRTES switch is a modified Ethernet switch that provides real-time traffic scheduling, dynamic Quality-of-Service and temporal isolation between real-time and non-real-time traffic. Herein, we propose a method, called Reduced Buffering Scheme, to conduct the traffic through multiple HaRTES switches in a multi-hop HaRTES architecture. In order to enable the new scheduling method we propose to modify the HaRTES switch structure. Moreover, we develop a response time analysis for the new method. We also compare the proposed method with a method previously proposed, called Distributed Global Scheduling, based on their traffic response times. We show that, the new method forwards all types of traffic including the highest, the medium and the lowest priority, faster than the previous method in most of the cases. Furthermore, we show that the new method performs even better for larger networks compared with the previous one.