OSS + ELC EU 2026

Industrial Ethernet protocols (EtherCAT, EtherNet/IP, PROFINET) require deterministic, low-latency packet processing that degrades when real-time and best-effort traffic compete for CPU resources. This work investigates the extent to which bounded latency behaviour can be achieved for real-time industrial traffic on a multi-core ARM Cortex-A53 SoC running PREEMPT_RT Linux while sharing a single Ethernet interface with concurrent best-effort traffic. The study demonstrates that both traffic types can coexist on a single physical port and be separated across cores using software-based techniques such as the XDP framework. To enforce bounded latency, CPU isolation, processor affinity, and real-time scheduling policies are applied to networking-related kernel threads and application tasks. Results compare real-time traffic latency and jitter across three configurations: no traffic steering, traffic steering to dedicated cores, and traffic steering with techniques to enforce bounded latency. The goal is a reproducible tuning guide for engineers deploying deterministic networking on Linux-based industrial platforms.