Non-Periodic Traffic Allocation in Time-Aware TSN Networks

Time-sensitive Networking (TSN) is a set of protocols to ensure latency bounds and guarantees in 802-based networks. One of these protocols (Time-Aware Shaper, TAS) synchronizes the network with the arrival of periodic traffic to guarantee a free path from origin to destination for this type of traffic. However, non-periodic or randomly arriving traffic still needs to be transported under this synchronized network, making it challenging for the network engineer to find new time-aware (TAS) parameters. In this paper, we present three offline alternatives for finding these parameters at different levels of allocation rate, flow latency, and computational time. We modeled the problem as a network of polling systems, formulated and solved a mixed-integer linear program, and developed two allocation heuristics, all designed for offline computation. Lastly, we extensively evaluate the performance of all the alternative approaches.