Survey of deterministic service assurance technology in time sensitive networking

Abstract

With the rapid development of information technology, new types of services such as remote surgery and high-precision robot control in the Internet of things and industrial Internet have necessitated new requirements for end-to-end latency. Traditional Ethernet technology has been found difficult to meet the requirements of various applications due to its transmission uncertainty property. Hence, deterministic networks have emerged as a solution, with time-sensitive networking (TSN) standing as a promising deterministic service assurance technology. TSN was designed to be compatible with traditional Ethernet, ensuring clock consistency between networks through high-precision time synchronization. By employing low-latency traffic shaping and data scheduling strategies, TSN effectively controlled data transmission delays and jitter. Furthermore, the combination of proactive fault prevention and network configuration mechanisms enabled the deterministic transmission of time-sensitive services. The deterministic service assurance technology was focused on within TSN. The background, development goals, advantages, and classification of TSN standards were introduced. An overview of current TSN standards was provided from four aspects: time synchronization, resource management, traffic control, and reliability. The current research status, both domestically and internationally, was reported. The strengths, weaknesses and applicable scenarios of different standards were analyzed and compared. The application value of TSN in fields such as automotive, industrial, and aerospace was elaborated upon, with research trends in each area being analyzed. The challenges facing the development of time-sensitive networks were summarized, and future research directions were discussed.

Keywords

• deterministic networking
• time sensitive networking
• time synchronization
• resource management
• flow control
• reliability