Online Stream-Aware Routing for TSN-Based Industrial Control Systems

Abstract

In the past decades, the evolution of Industrial Inter-net of Things (IIoT) and Industry 4.0 faces several challenges, and one of them is the proprietary network which causes a rising cost due to the interoperability, compatibility, and strict requirements. To deal with the challenge, industry advocates an open Ethernet-based standard under the IEEE 802.1 family, named Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN), to support real-time and critical applications, where the routing with TSN is still an open and ongoing research problem. Although there are some existing routing approaches, they are offline algorithms and thus not suitable for future industrial automation that needs to support dynamic reconfiguration. Also, they consider either only TSN traffic or only AVB traffic to determine the routing paths, which limits the overall solution space and fails to make the best use of TSN features. To address the issues above, we aim to explore an online routing problem considering both TSN and AVB traffic in a TSN network. It is very first to investigate the online routing problem considering both TSN and AVB traffic. We propose an Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) based approach with a low time complexity to solve the problem. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms a well-known solution in terms of the schedulability, performance, number of rerouted streams, and computational efficiency.