On the efficiency of sporadic servers on ethernet with FTT-SE

Ethernet is generating a growing interest as a network for real-time embedded systems such as airplanes and automobiles. In this realm, network reservations appear as important design elements that favor composability in the time domain. One Ethernet protocol that provides such reservations is FTT-SE. In this work-in-progress we make initial steps to assess the efficiency of one particular worst-case network delay analysis for sporadic reservations associated to asynchronous messages using extensive simulation. With over 1000 message sets we found that analytic values match the observations, on average, in 31% of the messages across all generated sets whereas for 85% of the cases, the analysis upper bounds are within 2.85 times the observed values.