A Heartbeat Protocol Based On The Real-Time Ethernet

Heartbeat mechanism is the basic part of the high ability cluster. At present people bring forward a lot of model and arithmetic, which has been widely used in many fields. Such as heartbeat ring mechanism, accelerate heartbeat protocol, Statistics model based on the probability, but all these models have some advantage and disadvantage. At present there are two important problems. At first, most heartbeat protocols are implemented on the application layer, they must go through the Linux kernel, which will be influenced by the task switch, it will cause several seconds delay. Secondly, traditional Ethernet use the CSMA/CD mechanism which may cause collision when there are lots of packets in the Ethernet. When the heartbeat packets have some collision it will make the other nodes make a wrong decision.To solve above problems, this paper presents a real-time heartbeat protocol based on the real-time Ethernet. This protocol improves the Heartbeat protocol from two sides. Firstly, this paper implemented the heartbeat protocol in the Linux kernel which can avoid the influence of the scheduling. Secondly, this protocol use the character of the real-time Ethernet TTEP which divides the packets into period packets and the non-period packets, and the TTEP can coordinate all the heartbeat packet, make sure there will be no collision between heartbeat packets. So it can accelerate the detection speed, and improve the usability and the stability of the system.This protocol was implemented on the computer of AMD 64 and the operation system version is linux-2.6.15.3.This protocol was implemented in the Linux kernel, using the skbuff structure to create the packet and send the packet by the timer which can reduce the delay and have a real-time ability. At the same time, this paper registers the packet in the TTEP interface, using the character of the real-time Ethernet TTEP to schedule these packets. These packets would be transmitted at the predefined instant which can avoid the collision, and can reduce the miscarriage of justice.