TSN-Counter: Dual-Granularity Cooperative Time Failure Detection and Classification in TSN

Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) provides deterministic transmission services for critical traffic (CT) through clock synchronization, traffic shaper, and traffic scheduling algorithms. However, time failures occurring at network nodes may cause some CT packets to be forwarded unscheduled, thereby destroying deterministic guarantees and affecting overall system stability. In this paper, we classify time failures into node-level and port-level failures, and present a counter-based mechanism called TSN-Counter for failure detection in TSN, which leverages periodic CT behavior to detect and classify timing faults with minimal overhead. First, a lightweight twostage detector flags any coarse-slot violation and immediately pinpoints the culprit port in a fine-slot pass. Next, a compact hash-tree structure with bounded fallback efficiently narrows down the set of affected flows, and a simple time-window check prunes spurious alarms. Finally, concise per-switch reports are aggregated at the controller for accurate fault tracing. Simulation results demonstrate that TSN-Counter can obtain much better performance than baseline methods, achieving 100% precision with over 98% recall and near-zero relative error. Compared with the state-of-the-art designs, TSN-Counter has the failure detection time decreased by 75.9% in various fault scenarios.