Quality of service MAC protocol for shared media in-house networks

Abstract

We present a method to enable real-time communication with guaranteed quality of service over shared media in-house networks. This method is a flexible approach for different kinds of applications with varying requirements on data rate and delay, like live multimedia communication, home-control and automation or WWW-services. It is based on an extension of the standard medium access control by a deterministic token-passing protocol that can be applied to different network technologies, like shared media Ethernet, HomePNA or Powerline. We demonstrate how a mathematical pre-runtime analysis of the timing behavior can be performed, so that quality of service and real-time behavior can be guaranteed even in worst case situations.