A Unified Inter-Domain QoS Signaling Scheme for Time-Sensitive Networking

Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) is an enhancement of Ethernet. It provides real-time capabilities in Layer-2 networks and guarantees quality of service (QoS) for data streams. TSN defines three different configuration models that specify how QoS requirements are signaled and reservations are admitted. End stations and bridges that use the same configuration model and are under the same administrative control form a so-called TSN domain within a larger Ethernet network. The procedure for QoS signaling of inter-domain streams, i.e., streams that are transmitted through different TSN domains, is challenging and not specified by standardization. The contribution of this work is manifold. First, we propose a novel unified signaling scheme for inter-domain communication with TSN. It relies only on TSN signaling protocols standardized by IEEE. Second, we show how the unified signaling scheme can be used to enable inter-domain QoS signaling across non-TSN domains, i.e., domains that natively do not support TSNbased admission control. Third, we present a model to calculate the delay of TSN QoS signaling. Fourth, we evaluate different TSN signaling approaches in a single and multiple domains. Our results indicate that centralized signaling causes shorter delay than distributed signaling. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the delay of centralized signaling mainly depends on the available compute power for configuration calculations.