Jitter-based policies to improve asynchronous bandwidth exploitation in fieldbus communication systems

An important problem in time-critical process control networks is to exploit the bandwidth fully and, at the same time, try to minimize the data delivery delay and serve all the stations fairly. The problem is particularly felt in fieldbuses which have to support traffic with hard time constraints. In this paper we present and evaluate some policies which, by allowing a controlled jitter on periodic traffic, allow the performance of asynchronous traffic produced by alarm signals, processing results, human operations, etc to be improved