An in-home digital network architecture for real-time and non-real-time communication

This paper describes an in-home digital network architecture that supports both real-time and non-real-time communication. The architecture deploys a distributed token mechanism to schedule communication streams and to offer guaranteed quality-of-service. Essentially, the token mechanism prevents collisions to occur in the network, thus making the network deterministic. The distributed token scheduler uses a preemptive earliest deadline first strategy, which guarantees a possible bandwidth utilization of 100 percent. To allow non-realtime communication however, only part of the available bandwidth is allocated by the scheduler to real-time traffic, typically 80 percent. The paper describes protocols to counter token loss and token duplication. The network is simulated and the paper shows some results from this simulation. Based on low-cost ethernet hardware, a prototype of the network is built and tested. Last, the paper describes future directions.