The RETHER(Real-time ETHERnet) Project

RETHER is a software-based timed-token protocol that provides real-time performance guarantees to multimedia applications without requiring any modifications to existing Ethernet hardware. RETHER implements a race-condition-free distributed admission control mechanism, and an efficient token-passing scheme that protects the network against token loss due to node failures or otherwise. To our knowledge, this is the first software implementation of a real-time protocol over existing Ethernet hardware.

This project is currently under development at the Experimental Systems Laboratory of the Computer Science Department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

People involved are :

  1. Tzi-cker Chiueh
  2. Chitra Venkatramani

Publications as of Aug. 1995

  1. Real-time traffic support on Ethernet
    Proc. of IEEE Real-time Systems Symposium, Dec. 1994.
  2. The design, implementation and evaluation of a software-based real-time Ethernet protocol
    In the proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM 95.
You can find more detailed information about RETHER over single and multiple Ethernet segments in my Thesis(ps, 1.5MB)

Other Related Projects

  1. The SBVS Project [Michael Vernick]
  2. Burst Handling of Digital Video Traffic [Li-chun Wang]