DA-DMPF: Delay-aware differential multi-path forwarding of industrial time-triggered flows in deterministic network

Abstract

The time-sensitive network (TSN) utilizes gating technology to achieve mixed traffic transmission across the common network, replacing dedicated networks with time division multiplexing, simplifying the interconnection architecture. TSN fundamentally changes the uncertainty of traditional Ethernet through clock synchronization, traffic scheduling, and network configuration. TSN can meet the requirements of industrial communication for low delay, low jitter, and high-reliable data transmission. It is also fully compatible with the existing Ethernet system and is an important communication platform supporting the development of the industrial Internet. Time-triggered flow is the key flow responsible for transmitting real-time data in time-sensitive networks. Its transmission should strictly follow the gating schedule. Selecting different transmission paths will affect the success rate of scheduling. To solve the delay optimization problem of industrial time-triggered (TT) flow path selection, this paper proposes a novel forwarding mechanism for industrial TT flow, namely delay-aware differential multi-path forwarding (DA-DMPF). This mechanism first designs a multipath forwarding index based on sending delay and processing delay by analyzing the end-to-end delay, then converts the multipath forwarding problem into a 0-1 integer linear planning problem, and finally solves the forwarding path set of the stream through differential multipath forwarding algorithm to achieve low delay parallel transmission of the stream. The simulation results show that compared with load-balanced multi-path forwarding and Hop-Load forwarding mechanisms, this scheme reduces the end-to-end average delay of industrial TT flows by 22.55% and 17.32% respectively, meeting the low delay transmission requirements of TT flows.