Flexible Measurement Testbed for Evaluating Time-Sensitive Networking in Industrial Automation Applications

Research output: Contribution to book/Conference proceedings/Anthology/ReportConference contributionContributedpeer-review

Abstract

Deterministic communications are required for industrial environments, yet their realization is a challenging task. Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) is intended to enable deterministic communication over inexpensive Ethernet networks. Standardized by the IEEE TSN working group, TSN enables precise control of time synchronization, traffic shaping, reliability enhancements, and network administration to answer the demands of industrial control applications. Subsequently, there is a significant need to enable turnkey research and implementation efforts. However, a current lack of open-sourced testbed implementations to investigate and study the behavior of TSN network devices limits verification to simulation and theoretical models. We introduce a publicly available, flexible, and open-sourced measurement testbed for evaluating TSN in the context of industrial automation applications to address the need to perform real-world measurements. In this contribution, we describe our testbed combining Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) hardware and existing open-source tools as a platform for in-depth evaluation of TSN devices. Providing detailed TSN backgrounds, we describe an in-depth performance analysis for our implementation. For a common Tactile Internet scenario, we observe an accuracy of close to 5 ns achievable with our publicly available COTS setup.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2022 IEEE International Conference on Network Softwarization
EditorsAlexander Clemm, Guido Maier, Carmen Mas Machuca, K.K. Ramakrishnan, Fulvio Risso, Prosper Chemouil, Noura Limam
PublisherIEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS)
Pages402-410
Number of pages9
ISBN (electronic)9781665406949
ISBN (print)978-1-6654-0695-6
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jul 2022
Peer-reviewedYes

Conference

Title2022 IEEE 8th International Conference on Network Softwarization (NetSoft)
Duration27 June - 1 July 2022
LocationMilan, Italy

External IDs

Scopus 85136788439
WOS 000854018800068
Mendeley 3a4c6574-3455-32bb-b58d-3e9bd33aeb8b
ORCID /0000-0001-7008-1537/work/142248616
ORCID /0000-0003-0745-2264/work/142254135
ORCID /0000-0001-8469-9573/work/161890956

Keywords

Keywords

  • Performance evaluation, Automation, Turnkey project, Current measurement, Hardware, Behavioral sciences, Software measurement, IEEE Standards, Measurement, Quality of Service, Testbed, Time-sensitive Networking