HARD REAL-TIME NETWORKING ON FIREWIRE

This paper investigates the possibility of using standard, low-cost, widely used FireWire as a new generation fieldbus medium for real-time distributed control applications. A real-time software subsys- tem, RT-FireWire was designed that can, in combination with Linux-based real-time operating system, provide hard real-time communication over FireWire. In addition, a high-level module that can emulate Ethernet over RT-FireWire was implemented. This additional module enables existing IP-based real- time communication frameworks to work on top of FireWire. The real-time behavior of RT-FireWire was demonstrated with a simple control setup. Furthermore, an outlook of the future development on RT-FireWire is given.