Configuration of multi-shaper Time-Sensitive Networking for industrial applications

IEEE 802.1 Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) has proposed several shapers, for example, time-aware shaper (TAS, 802.1Qbv), asynchronous traffic shaping (ATS, 802.1Qcr), credit-based shaper (CBS, 802.1Qav), and cyclic queuing and forwarding (CQF, 802.1Qch). The shapers have their advantages and disadvantages and can be used in isolation or in combination to address the varied timing requirements of industrial application streams. There is very limited work on how to analyse and configure shaper combinations. The authors are interested in the configuration optimisation of multi-shaper TSN networks, targeting the TAS + CBS, TAS + ATS, and TAS + Multi-CQF combinations. The authors first propose multi-shaper integration approaches, focusing on a novel iterative delay analysis for TAS + ATS, an approach to integrate TAS and CQF by placing constraints on TAS scheduling as well as the TAS and CBS integration. We formulate the combinatorial optimisation problem of configuring multi-shaper TSN networks, which consists, for example, of the routing of streams, the assignment of streams to the egress port queues, and the synthesis of gate control lists for TAS. Then, the authors propose a solution based on a simulated annealing metaheuristic. The proposed solutions are evaluated on large realistic test cases, up to tens of thousands of streams and devices.