On Determinism in Event-Triggered Distributed Systems with Time Synchronization

Abstract

We study event processing in locally distributed realtime systems. The objective is to use event-triggered communication together with a time-synchronization protocol, in particular. IEEE 1588 over Ethernet, to achieve the similar level of determinism as in statically scheduled time-triggered systems. Given a distributed application with component properties and input event rate characterization, we discuss an analytic procedure that bounds performance parameters. These parameters are also necessary for deterministic implementation of the application. The procedure is experimentally evaluated on a setup with standard software and networking components.