Section: Application Domains

Embedded Networks

Critical real-time embedded systems (cars, aircrafts, spacecrafts) are nowadays made up of multiple computers communicating with each other. The real-time constraints typically associated with operating systems now extend to the networks of communication between sensors/actuators and computers, and between the computers themselves. Once a media is shared, the time between sending and receiving a message depends not only on technological constraints, but also, and mainly from the interactions between the different streams of data sharing the media. It is therefore necessary to have techniques to guarantee maximum network delays, in addition to local scheduling constraints, to ensure a correct global real-time behaviour to distributed applications/functions.

Moreover, pessimistic estimate may lead to an overdimensioning of the network, which involves extra weight and power consumption. In addition, these techniques must be scalable. In a modern aircraft, thousands of data streams share the network backbone. Therefore algorithm complexity should be at most polynomial.