Traffic Planning for Time-Sensitive Communication

Abstract

Many industries, including the automotive industry and industrial automation, have a need for reliable real-time communication. To satisfy this need, industry-specific, often proprietary, solutions have been developed in recent decades. Time-sensitive networking (TSN) is addressing a grand unification of these existing technologies to leverage cross-industry cost efficiency as well as to guarantee a stable growth path of communication capabilities. While the functionality of time-sensitive networking is exhaustively standardized in IEEE 802.1, configuration standards for TSN are largely missing. Thus, in this article we review the IEEE TSN standards, in particular 802.1Qbv, and continue to illustrate a reference model for traffic planning for time-sensitive communication. Furthermore, the article references a detailed technical report describing the complete model, which is ideally suited as a starting point for standardization and ensures the interoperability of future TSN traffic planning tools.