An Enhanced Reconfiguration for Deterministic Transmission in Time-Sensitive Networks

Time-aware shaper (TAS) is key to enabling deterministic guarantees in time-sensitive networks (TSN), but it requires precise configuration for specific traffic scenarios. Dynamic traffic scenarios are increasingly commonplace with the rise of emerging applications, necessitating TAS reconfiguration to adapt to the changes in traffic. However, existing mechanisms primarily reconfigure TAS by generating a new gate control list (GCL) and transitioning to it, which may lead to temporary violations of bounds on delay or jitter, providing no persistently deterministic guarantees. In this paper, we propose a novel TAS reconfiguration mechanism with the virtual GCL (VGCL) to satisfy the demands of dynamic traffic while guaranteeing deterministic transmission. It implements TAS reconfiguration for dynamic traffic by embedding different VGCLs into the GCL, avoiding the need for the GCL transition. Thus, the reconfiguration problem is modeled as an embedding problem by using the VGCL and we develop algorithms to solve it. Experimental results demonstrate that our mechanism can well reconfigure TAS for dynamic traffic without the GCL transition, and increase the reconfiguration success rate in various scenarios compared with the existing approaches.