Application Layer Benefits of Redundant Disjoint Paths in a Real-Time Ethernet

Abstract

Reliability is one of the key performance indicators of a real-time Ethernet. One strategy to improve said reliability is to duplicate the transmitted packets and then transmit the duplications over additional redundant disjoint paths. Depending on the statistical properties of the disjoint paths the window of operation can be substantially enlarged. We investigate the practical benefits of such a real-time Ethernet and extensively study the increase of the window of operation. We provide an evaluation of the application layer performance parametrized by the most important network properties: latency, jitter, and packet loss. We show that the presence of a redundant path reduces the overall latency, decreases the network jitter, and the packet loss probability is even decreased to its square what makes this setup especially appealing in high packet loss environments, e.g., WAN or WLAN.