An Experimental Study of TSN-NonTSN Coexistence

Abstract

Time sensitive networking (TSN) has a promising future in the Industrial Automation and Industrial Internet of Things, with advantages such as interoperability, coexistence of different types of data, data stream scheduling mechanisms, network configuration and management tools. The core technology of TSN includes precise clock synchronization, network bandwidth reservation, and traffic shaping, which ensures high reliability, low latency and other industrial needs. A key feature of TSN is the traffic scheduling mechanism, which can accommodate hard real time streams of critical data with bounded end to end delays. In this work we have setup a heterogeneous TSN test bed with five TSN-enabled devices from different vendors. This study summarizes the devices and tools used in the setup. We have prioritized testing the time-aware shaping feature of TSN as compared to time synchronization. While performing the time aware shaping feature testing we have come across the tools that support configuration of devices individually or as a group. This paper shares the hand-on experience on the TSN feature support from specific devices, their participation in a simple TSN system, their performance and the tools supported for the configuration. The results are articulated, and it is an ongoing work targeting future additions of application layer protocols and scale it up to understand what it takes for engineering a TSN enabled large scale system.