Poster Abstract: A Hardware/Software Platform for Real-time Ethernet Cluster Simulation in OMNeT++

Cluster simulation is a popular method for supporting system integration in various distributed applications by simulating the environment of a subsystem under test. Particularly in real-time systems, the timing requirements of transmission and reception must be fulfilled, which is not easy to achieve. In this paper, we contribute a scheme for cluster simulation of real-time Ethernet (RTEthernet) based distributed systems. It relies on the discrete event-based simulation framework OMNeT++, interconnected with an ARM-based co-processor. Our approach allows coupling a real-world RTEthernet subsystem with virtual components running in the discrete simulation, that realise the required behaviour for the subsystem. We have evaluated the performance limits of our approach regarding latency and jitter, when running the simulation on a Linux system with the real-time Kernel patch. The results show that the timing requirements for the cluster simulation of small RTEthernet networks can be achieved.