Mode-changes in COTS time-triggered network hardware without online reconfiguration

Abstract

Time-triggered networks are widely used for safety-critical applications. Being offline scheduled, flexibility and adaptivity typically come at the price of very low resource utilization, if possible at all. In this paper, we present the Stacked Scheduling Approach (SSA) for time-triggered networks to enable mode changes and implicit adaptation in such networks by enabling reuse of network bandwidth reservations. We describe SSA in detail and conduct a case study to show that SSA can be implemented in COTS time-triggered network hardware and validate the approach by implementing an example in a COTS TTEthernet network.