Scheduling in time sensitive networks (TSN) for mixed-criticality industrial applications

IEEE 802.1 Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) is a set of IEEE standards that extend Ethernet for safety-critical and real-time applications. TSN is envisioned to be widely used in several applications areas, from industrial automation to in-vehicle networking. TSN supports mixed-criticality applications via multiple traffic classes: Time-Triggered (TT) communication, Audio-Video-Bridging (AVB) streams with bounded end-to-end latency as well as Best-Effort messages.

TT traffic is scheduled via Gate Control Lists (GCLs) specified for each queue of an egress port. Although researchers have started to propose approaches for the GCL synthesis, all the work so far has ignored lower priority real-time traffic such as AVB, resulting in GCLs that increase the worst-case delays of AVB traffic rendering it unschedulable.

In this paper, we propose a GCL synthesis approach based on a Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure, which takes into account the AVB traffic, such that both TT and the AVB traffic are schedulable. Our approach is evaluated on several test cases.