Routing and scheduling co-design for holistic software-defined deterministic network

Abstract

As a result of the growing complexity of industrial Internet applications, traditional hardware-based network designs are encountering challenges in terms of programmability and dynamic adaptability as they struggle to meet the real-time, high-reliability transmission requirements for the vast quantities of data generated in industrial environments. This paper proposes a holistic software-defined deterministic network (HSDDN) design solution. This solution uses a centralized controller to implement a comprehensive software definition, ranging from the network layer down to the physical layer. Within the wireless access domain, we decouple the standard radio-frequency modules from baseband processing to realize a software-defined physical layer, which then allows us to adjust the data transmission cycles and tag the trigger rates to meet demand for low-power, high-concurrency transmission. Within the wired network domain, we integrate software-defined networking with time-sensitive networking and propose a coordinated design strategy to address routing and the deterministic scheduling problem. We define a set of constraints to ensure collaborative transmission of the periodic and aperiodic data flows. To guarantee load balancing across all paths and timeslots, we introduce the Jain’s fairness index as the optimization objective and then construct a nondeterministic polynomial-time (NP)-hard joint optimization problem. Furthermore, an algorithm called Tabu search for routing and scheduling with dual-stages (TSRS-DS) is proposed. Simulation experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed HSDDN architecture.

Keywords

• Deterministic networking
• Software-defined networking
• Software-defined physical layer
• Time-sensitive networking
• Backscatter communication
• Routing and scheduling co-design