Frame transmission time control for TDMA-based ethernet

Processes of network-based control system require accurate timing control of frame transmission. A special network interface card (NIC) was proposed and implemented to adjust the timing accurately based on a dual queue structure and precise time synchronization mechanism in this paper. A high resolution measurement tool for frame transmission latency was also developed to validate the implementation. The measured results verified that the proposed NIC achieved the latency shorter than 790 ns and the deviation of it less than 49 ns while a commercial off-the-shelf NIC showed the latency longer than 9700 ns and the deviation of it more than 300 ns.