Confronting the performances of a switched Ethernet network with industrial constraints by using the network calculus

The Ethernet network is more and more used to interconnect industrial devices. The objective of this paper is to study the performances of such a network to support real-time communications. For this, first we propose a general representation to model a switched Ethernet network by using a sequence of elementary components such as buffers, multiplexers, etc. Second, we aggregate the individual temporal properties of each component given in the Cruz' survey to obtain a global formula enabling one to calculate the maximum end-to-end delay for any industrial communication scenarios. Finally, we deduce the limits of the switched Ethernet network regarding the number of input/output cards connected to the network and to the sizes of periodic and aperiodic messages. Copyright (c) 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.