SvTI: SFC-driven Queue Injection in Virtual Time-sensitive Network via Augmented Topology

Abstract

Driven by the coexisted heterogeneous communication protocols and diverse quality of service (QoS) requirements of industrial applications, time-sensitive networking (TSN) has been proposed as a promising and unified standard to provide deterministic transmission. However, the traffic scheduling of the TSN network should be orchestrated in a coordinated manner, which is challenging to respond to dynamic applications rapidly. For this, network function virtualization (NFV) has been introduced to eliminate the tight coupling between functions and devices, thus enabling a more flexible network resource allocation. However, NFV cannot be simply applied in a TSN network due to the inherent complex characteristics of TSN. To address this issue, we develop SvTI, a service function chain (SFC) driven queue injection scheme in the NFV-enabled TSN network. The basic idea of SvTI is to jointly model virtual network functions (VNFs) embedding and the TSN multi-queue characteristic by constructing an ordered augmented topology according to the SFC. Thus, the VNF embedding and TSN queue injection problem can be transformed into a shortest path routing problem. Besides, considering the QoS requirements of applications, a TSN queue-based topology division mechanism is proposed to simplify the augmented topology further and improve the algorithm efficiency. Simulation results show that our SvTI obtains a smaller graph size than other works and is more scalable.