Supporting real-time traffic on Ethernet

Ethernet has been the dominant local area network architecture in the last decade, and we believe that it will continue to be so because of its cost-effectiveness and the availability of higher-bandwidth Ethernets. We propose and evaluate a software-based protocol called RETHER (Real-time ETHERnet) that provider real-time performance guarantees to multimedia applications without modifying existing Ethernet hardware. RETHER features a hybrid mode of operation to reduce the performance impact on non-real-time network packets, a race-condition-free distributed admission control mechanism, and an efficient token-passing scheme that protects the network against token loss due to node failures.<>