Large industrial control and automation applications require reliable communication with strict timing constraints between distributed communication equipment. Packet-switched networks are widely used as a high-speed, deterministic, and low-cost solution to handle these types of distributed real-time systems. Although research on guaranteeing timing requirements in packet-switched networks has been done, communication reliability is still an open problem for hard real-time applications. In this paper, a framework for enhancing the reliability in multihop packet-switched networks is presented. Moreover, an admission control mechanism using a real-time analysis is suggested to provide deadline guarantees for hard real-time traffic. The performance evaluation of the proposed solution shows a possible enhancement of the message error rate by several orders of magnitude while the decrease in network utilization stays at a reasonable level. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014