Reliable data distribution in voice communication environments

Abstract

Due to lowering equipment and maintenance costs as well as optimization towards fast failure detection and convergence time, Ethernet based technologies have found their way into safety critical communication systems. This article focuses on message-oriented transfer of data packets matching ordering, reliability, and group membership criteria. Messaging systems, available under open source licenses, are discussed with respect to a specified use case; two of them - Corosync and Spread Toolkit - are analyzed regarding their scalability within a loss-free Local Area Network. A functionality analysis in case of network partitions is out of focus for this work. The results show slight advantages of Spread over Corosync for the defined use case. Even though, Corosync enables sending significantly higher message rates for a low number of recipients, Spread catches up and succeeds in case these numbers increase.