On the impact of bursty cross-traffic on distributed real-time process control

Cross traffic is present in all parts of current networks, both local and wide-area. Experiments are presented which show the effect that different types of cross traffic have on a distributed real-time control application. This cross-traffic takes the following forms: no traffic, continuous high volume traffic, small-burst traffic, large-burst traffic, and Internet traffic. It is concluded that bursty cross traffic has adverse effects on distributed process control even when the average network utilization is low; showing that over provisioning by itself can still lead to poor quality of service.