Assessment of Real-Time Communications Capabilities of Network Protocols in Distributed Systems

The increase of interest in the possible uses of the UNIX operating system in applications which are time constrained has generated the definition of a set of standard requirements (POSIX.1b) which have to be met in order to guarantee real-time capabilities. This article focuses on the possibility of using the Linux operating system in a real-time distributed environment. An analysis of the performance of Linux on different platforms using the UDP, TCP and RPC transmission protocols on an Ethernet local area network has been carried out. From results obtained it is possible to give an indication of the real-time limits of the Linux operating system used together with an Ethernet local area network. Keywords: Distributed Real-Time Systems, Ethernet, Linux. 1 Introduction Real-time computing is currently an area of intense research which offers challenging problems whose solution can be immediately applicable in several industrial areas. A real-time system is used every time the necess..