Incremental path-selection and scheduling for time-sensitive networks

Abstract

Industrial real-time applications demand their communication networks be robust and deterministic so that packets are delivered with bounded delay and jitter. The IEEE Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) Task Group has amended the standards of IEEE 802.3 Ethernet to support time-triggered flows of real-time applications. However, the issues of routing and scheduling are left as open problems. Specifically, majority of the state-of-the-art scheduling efforts make certain assumptions, such as assuming that the routing information is known textit{a priori} to focus on the scheduling problem or assuming that the information of flows is known in advance. Other studies that avoided these assumptions ignore certain valuable information that could be taken advantage of to make better routing decisions, such as the residual bandwidth. In this paper, we first propose an incremental QoS-aware path selection algorithm that uses QoS measurement to route TSN flows. Then, we introduce multiple incremental scheduling algorithms that address above mentioned issues, and demonstrate their performance.