Abstract
The continuous improvement of Ethernet technologies is boosting the eagerness of extending their use to also cover factoryfloor distributed real time applications. Indeed, it is remarkable the considerable amount of research work that has been devoted to the timing analysis of Ethernet-based technologies in the past few years. It happens, however, that the majority of those works are restricted to the analysis of sub-sets of the overall computing and communication system, thus without addressing timeliness in a holistic fashion. To this end, in this paper we address an approach, based on simulation, aiming at extracting temporal properties of Commercial-Of-The-Shelf (COTS) Ethernet-based factory-floor distributed systems. This framework is being applied to a specific COTS technology, Ethernet/IP. In this paper, we reason about the modeling and simulation of Ethernet/IP-based systems, and on the use of statistical analysis techniques to provide useful results on timeliness.