A Time-Triggered Ethernet (TTE) Switch

This paper presents the design of a time-triggered Ethernet (TTE) switch, which is one of the core units of the time-triggered Ethernet system. Time-triggered Ethernet is a communication architecture intended to support event-triggered and time-triggered traffic in a single communication system. The TTE switch distinguishes between two classes of traffic. The event-triggered (ET) traffic is handled in conformance with the existing Ethernet standard, while the time-triggered (TT) traffic is transmitted with temporal guarantees. A TTE switch is used in the time-triggered Ethernet system for exchanging time-triggered messages in a time-predictable way while continuing the support of standard Ethernet traffic in order to use existing networking protocols such as IP, UDP or IPX without any modifications. In this paper we present the mechanisms the TTE switch uses to guarantee a constant transmission delay for time-triggered traffic. Also an experimental validation of these mechanisms is given