TSNSCHED: Automated Schedule Generation for Time Sensitive Networking

Aellison Cassimiro T. dos Santos, Ben Schneider and Vivek Nigam

October 2019

abstract

Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) is a set of standards enabling high performance deterministic communication using different scheduling mechanisms. Due to the size of industrial networks, configuring TSN networks is challenging to be done manually. We present TSNsched, a tool for automatic generation of schedules for TSN. TSNsched takes as input the logical topology of a network, expressed as flows, and outputs schedules for TSN switches using an SMT-solver. The generated schedule guarantees the desired network performance (specified in terms of latency and jitter), if such schedules exist. TSNsched can synthesize IEEE 802.1Qbv schedules and supports unicast and multicast flows, such as, in Publish/Subscribe networks. TSNsched can be run as a standalone tool and also allows rapid prototyping with the available JAVA API. We evaluate TSNsched on a number of realistic-size network topologies. TSNsched can generate high performance schedules, with average latency less than 1000us, and average jitter less than 20us, for TSN networks, with up to 73 subscribers and up to 10 multicast flows.