Soft Real-Time Communication Over Dual Non-Real-Time Networks (Extended Abstract)

) Ben Kao Hector Garcia-Molina y November 23, 1992 Abstract In this paper we consider systems with redundant communication paths, and show how applications can exploit the redundancy to improve real-time communications. We consider two policies, one that evenly distributes load, and one that partitions load according to packet slackness. We evaluate the effectiveness of these policies through analysis and simulation. 1 Introduction With the development of distributed real-time systems, time constrained communication has become a topic of growing interest. The goal is to deliver packets at their destination by a given deadline, specified at packet arrival time. Applications that may require time constrained communication include packetized voice [6], distributed sensor networks [9], and real-time distributed databases [2]. Multimedia systems, integrating images, sound, and text, represent another important application. In this case, the communication system must support timely del..