This award establishes a 1-year NSF planning grant as part of the NSF/CISE Clean-slate Internet Reinvention Initiative (CIRI), which aims to develop the research agenda for a next-generation Internet. The Internet has impacted all aspects of society: it has fundamentally changed the manner in which corporations, governments, and ordinary citizens receive, manage, and deliver services. However, there is a fundamental mismatch between the design of the original "best-effort" Internet protocols and the requirements of the real-time control system domain. Since the majority of real-time networks currently are isolated, a variety of disparate and largely incompatible real-time network protocols have been developed and standardized for industry adoption in various application domains. Examples are: FieldBus for industrial process control, ARINC for aviation, and CAN and FlexRay in automotive applications. However, increasingly, safety-critical applications such as medical systems, critical infrastructures such as the power grid and, manufacturing, and automotive and aviation systems depend on networked interoperation. This planning activity will bring together the real time embedded systems and networking communities to rethink how coherent "real time Internet" services could be provided and to establish requirements, approaches, and research needs for future real-time Internet capability.
