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This paper presents the rational for and an outline of the design of a time-triggered (TT) Ethernet that unifies real-time and non-real-time traffic into a single coherent communication architecture. TT Ethernet is intended to support all types of applications, from simple data acquisition systems, to multimedia systems up to the most demanding safety-critical real-time control systems which require a fault-tolerant communication service that must be certified. TT Ethernet distinguishes between two traffic categories: the standard event-triggered Ethernet traffic and the time-triggered traffic that is temporally guaranteed. The event triggered traffic in TT Ethernet is handled in conformance with the existing Ethernet standards of the IEEE. The design of TT Ethernet has been driven by the requirement of certification of safety-critical configurations and an uncompromising stand with respect to the integration of legacy applications and legacy Ethernet hardware.
Kopetz et al. (2005) studied this question.