Combining static priority and weighted round-robin like packet scheduling in AFDX for incremental certification and mixed-criticality support

The Deficit Round Robin (DRR) policy can be used at the outgoing ports of communication switches to schedule distinct classes of frames, providing each class with a guaranteed share of the network bandwidth. The independence between traffic classes helps to improve the incremental design process, incremental certification and scheduling flows with mixed criticalities. DRR leads however to a less efficient use of hardware resources, this is why we also envisage the combined use of DRR and Static Priority (SP). We then provide a first quantitative assessment on a realistic case-study about the use of DRR, possibly combined with SP, in avionics networking and shed some light on its range of applicability.