Mapping TSN Traffic Scheduling and Shaping to FPGA-Based Architecture

Abstract

Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN), which evolves from the Ethernet standards, has been developed to ensure deterministic transmission in data networks. Asynchronous Traffic Shaping (ATS) extends the conventional synchronized TSN with an asynchronous scheduler to guarantee a bounded transmitting delay. In this work, we present a Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) implementation of a TSN scheduling entity, which leverages ATS for the frame forwarding process. We explore the ATS design by function blocks and compare it with a benchmark design utilizing strict-priority scheduling. In terms of operating frequency, our results indicate that strict-priority scheduling performs 1.05% to 9.56% higher maximum frequency than ATS with the same configurations. Regarding resource utilization, ATS consumes 51% to 119% more logic blocks and 51% to 101% more registers than strict-priority scheduling. Based on the synthesis and fitting results from Register-Transfer Level (RTL) simulations, we provide a general vision of designing and implementing considerations of the ATS function. Specifically, we show the influences of the buffer and bus width configuration on the FPGA implementation scale and data rate.