A max plus algebra based scheduling algorithm for supporting time triggered services in ethernet networks

The aerospace industry is interested in low-cost Ethernet technologies for their use as telecommunication networks within spacecraft (launchers and satellites). Current networks (e.g. 1553B bus) are characterized by low performance in terms of supported bit rates and very high maintenance costs. Some evolutions of the Ethernet standard (ARINC 664, TTEthernet, Time Sensitive Networking) have been proposing for some years now to meet the real time requirements of aerospace applications. In this paper we propose a more cost-effective solution that uses traditional Ethernet switches and defines a message scheduling algorithm capable of meeting real time requirements. Message scheduling is formulated as an optimization problem whose high computational complexity leads us to define a heuristic of polynomial complexity and based on max-plus algebra evaluations. We evaluated the scheduling algorithm for the scenario of a launcher network and observed that the performance obtained in terms of bandwidth consumption does not differ from that obtained in TTEthernet-based networks.