Towards synchronous deterministic channels for the Internet of Things

Embedded systems are omnipresent in our daily lives and rapidly gaining more and more importance, with performance improvements and technological evolutions in several directions. One of the most promising directions of evolution is in their interconnection. Already today there is a broad variety of use cases for interconnected embedded systems (automobiles, airplanes, automated production halls, etc.) and the most cutting edge examples demand the distributed embedded systems to tightly couple their operation. As a direct result of this tight coupling, stringent requirements on the underlying communication network immediately arise. The Internet-of-Things (IoT) as a discipline and movement to systematically connect distributed embedded systems on large or even Internet-like scales, promises a new generation of systems and system-of-systems. In order to also enable tight coupling of embedded systems in the IoT, there is a need for deterministic communication channels with predictable and low communication latency and jitter. In this paper we discuss how synchronous deterministic channels can be developed for the IoT by application of the time-triggered communication paradigm and other technology standards currently under development.