The timely delivery of inter-task real-time messages over a communication network is the key to successfully developing distributed real-time computer systems. These systems are rapidly developed and increasingly used in many areas such as automation industry. This work concentrates on the timed-token Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol, which is one of the most suitable candidates to support real-time communication due to its inherent timing property of bounded medium access time. The support of real-time communication with the timed-token MAC protocol has been studied using a rigorous mathematical analysis. Specifically, to guarantee the deadlines of synchronous messages (real-time messages defined in the timed-token MAC protocol), a novel and practical approach is developed for allocating synchronous bandwidth to a general message set with the minimum deadline (Dmin) larger than the Target Token Rotation Time (TTRT). Synchronous bandwidth is defined as the maximum time for which a node can transmit its synchronous messages every time it receives the token. It is a sensitive paramater in the control of synchronous message transmission and must be properly allocated to individual nodes to guarantee deadlines of real-time messages. Other issues related to the schedulability test, including the required buffer size and the Worst Case Achievable Utilisation (WCAU) of the proposed approach, are then discussed. Simulations and numerical examples demonstrate that this novel approach performs better than any previously published local synchronous bandwidth allocation (SBA) schemes, in terms of its ability to guarantee the real-time traffic. A proper selection of the TTRT, which can maximise the WCAU of the proposed SBA scheme, is addressed. The work presented in this thesis is compatible with any network standard where timed-token MAC protocol is employed and therefore can be applied by engineers building real-time systems using these standards.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:570909 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Wang, Jun |
| Publisher | University of Bedfordshire |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://hdl.handle.net/10547/241811 |
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