On the Impact of Bursty Cross-Traffic on Distributed Real-Time Process Control
Brian P. Robinson
ABB

Cross traffic is present in all parts of current networks,
both local and wide-area. Experiments are presented which
show the effect that different types of cross traffic have on a
distributed real-time control application. This cross-traffic
takes the following forms: no traffic, continuous high
volume traffic, small-burst traffic, large-burst traffic, and
Internet traffic. It is concluded that bursty cross traffic has
adverse effects on distributed process control even when the
average network utilization is low; showing that over
provisioning by itself can still lead to poor quality of service.

Joint work with V. Liberatore