Toward Determinism in 5G Transport: Adaptive Scheduling Strategies for Time-Aware Shaper Under Mobility

Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) is a key enabler for deterministic communication in latency–critical 5G applications, such as autonomous systems and industrial control. The Time-Aware Shaper (TAS) provides strong temporal guarantees under synchronized conditions, but its fixed slot timing makes it vulnerable to disruptions in mobile 5G transport networks, where wireless variability and Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request (HARQ) retransmissions de-synchronize gates and flows. To address these challenges, we introduce and evaluate two enhanced TSN scheduling strategies through OMNeT++ simulations. The Asynchronous Slot-Overlapping TAS improves flexibility by enabling overlapping transmission slots, reducing critical traffic queuing delay by up to 42% without requiring global synchronization – though at the cost of increased best-effort (BE) packet drops and reduced throughput. The Environment-Adaptive TAS dynamically aligns slot timing with traffic periodicity and HARQ-induced retransmissions, achieving a more balanced trade-off: it reduces BE packet drops by approximately 10% while lowering mean end-to-end (E2E) delay of critical traffic by up to 6 μs compared to Priority-based scheduling. These results highlight the potential of adaptive, environment-aware scheduling to extend TSN capabilities into dynamic 5G transport networks.