Integrated Cost Optimization and Preemptable Scheduling for Real-Time Ethernet Applications

Ethernet communication technology is growing in deployments across many real-time embedded systems. Through the IEEE 802.1 standardization group, Ethernet has been enhanced with several protocols and traffic scheduling policies, commonly known as Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN). Timetriggered communication is a common approach in TSN, but unfortunately not able to meet timing constraints for applications with very stringent real-time requirements. Past work has addressed this issue by combining time-aware scheduling with frame preemption, another key TSN standard. While frame preemption enhances schedulability, it comes with additional hardware cost for endpoints and switches. To reconcile the requirements of low-cost, real-time applications, this paper addresses the joint problem of minimizing hardware preemption cost and scheduling real-time communications across packetswitched Ethernet networks. We propose a monolithic SMT solution as well as efficient heuristic approaches to minimize cost and synthesize preemptable time-triggered network schedules. The proposed approaches have been evaluated through extensive experiments.