Schedulability Analysis of Best-Effort Traffic in TSN Networks

Abstract

This paper presents a schedulability analysis for the Best-Effort (BE) traffic class within Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) networks. The presented analysis considers several features in the TSN standards, including the Credit-Based Shaper (CBS), the Time-Aware Shaper (TAS) and the frame preemption. Although the BE class in TSN is primarily used for the traffic with no strict timing requirements, some industrial applications prefer to utilize this class for the non-hard real-time traffic instead of classes that use the CBS. The reason mainly lies in the fact that the complexity of TSN configuration becomes significantly high when the time-triggered traffic via the TAS and other classes via the CBS are used altogether. We demonstrate the applicability of the presented analysis on a vehicular application use case. We show that a network designer can get information on the schedulability of the BE traffic, based on which the network configuration can be further refined with respect to the application requirements.