Abstract
Time-sensitive networking (TSN) is a promising technique in many fields such as industrial automation and autonomous driving. The standardization of TSN has been rapidly improved by the IEEE 802.1 TSN working group. Currently, it has formed a comprehensive standard system with a wide range of choices. However, there is a large gap between TSN standards and application specific TSN systems. Designers need to determine the required TSN standards and standard implementation methods based on the application’s transmission performance and reliability requirements. Therefore, an easy-to-use developing platform for rapid TSN system prototyping and evaluation plays a vital role in the application of TSN technologies. This article mainly introduces OpenTSN, an open source project that supports rapid TSN system customization. This project has three features, which are SDN-based TSN network control mechanism, time-sensitive management protocol and time-sensitive switching model, for building an efficient TSN system. OpenTSN opens all the hardware and software source codes so that designers can quickly and flexibly customize the TSN system according to their own needs, maximizing the reuse of existing code and reducing the customization complexity. With this project, two FPGA-based prototyping examples with star and ring topology are presented at the experimental section. The experiment results show that the synchronization precision of the entire testing network is under 32 ns and the transmission performance matches the theory analysis of the testing Cyclic Queue and Forwarding based TSN network.
Highlights
In many distributed hard real-time and safety-critical application domains, such as automotive and industrial control applications, the current proprietary bus-based networking technologies are reaching their limits in supporting the increasing communication bandwidth requirements (Yang et al 2019)
Different with the ASIC solutions targeted for Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) switches, OpenTSN provides FPGA-based hardware solutions for both TSN switches (TSNSwitch) and adapters (TSNNic), and a TSN network controller (TSNLight) for the control and management of a TSN network built in OpenTSN
To help developers rapidly customize and evaluate a TSN system on FPGAs from different level, this article presented OpenTSN. It is an open source project which contains the necessary hardware and software components. These components are built based on the concluded basic features including a SDN-based TSN network control mechanism, a time-sensitive management protocol and a time-sensitive switching model
Summary
In many distributed hard real-time and safety-critical application domains, such as automotive and industrial control applications, the current proprietary bus-based networking technologies are reaching their limits in supporting the increasing communication bandwidth requirements (Yang et al 2019). Our work realizes the preliminary idea presented in Time-Sensitive Networking, and extends it by providing basic design methods for implementing an application-specific TSN system. By using this project, designers can rapidly customize their TSN systems on FPGAs from different level, e.g. system level, device level and module level with maximal reuse of standard modules. TSNLight is a software TSN network controller that controls the underlying TSN devices in a centralized mode With these components, designers can build a basic TSN system by customizing the corresponding components according to their application requirements.
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