The Throughput Gain of Hypercycle-level Resource Reservation for Time-Triggered Ethernet

Time-Triggered Communication is a key technology for many safety-critical systems, with applications spanning the areas of aerospace and industrial control. Such communication relies on time-triggered flows, with each flow consisting of periodic packets originating from a source and destined for a destination node. Each packet needs to reach its destination before its deadline. Different flows can have different cycle lengths. To achieve assured transmission of time-triggered flows, existing efforts constrain the packets of a flow to be cyclically transmitted along the same path. Under such Fixed Cyclic Scheduling (FCS), reservation for flows with different cycle lengths can become incompatible over a shared link, limiting the total number of admissible flows. Considering the cycle lengths of different flows, a hyper-cycle has length equal to their least common multiple (LCM). It determines the time duration over which the scheduling compatibility of the different flows can be checked. In this work, we propose a more flexible schedule scheme called the Hypercycle-level Flexible Schedule (HFS) scheme, where a flow's resource reservation can change across cycles within a hypercycle. HFS can significantly increase the number of admitted flows by providing more scheduling options while remaining perfectly compatible with existing Time-Triggered Ethernet system. We show that, theoretically the possible capacity gain provided by HFS over FCS can be unbounded. We formulate the joint pathfinding and scheduling problem under HFS as an ILP problem which we prove to be NP-Hard. To solve HFS efficiently, we further propose a least-load-first heuristic (HFS-LLF), solving HFS as a sequence of shortest path problems. Extensive study shows that HFS admits up to 6 times the number of flows achieved by FCS. Moreover, our proposed HFS-LLF can run 104 times faster than solving HFS using a generic solver.