Implementation and Orchestration of IEEE 802.1CB FRER in OMNeT++

Abstract

IEEE Time-sensitive Networking (TSN) family of standards enables real-time and deterministic networks on top of standard Ethernet. It also offers a seamless redundancy protocol, 802.1CB Frame Replication and Elimination for Reliability (FRER), to protect the network against node and link failures. Although its effective use is currently being studied by many researchers, the management of FRER can be complicated and limited to only small topologies. Manual configuration of switches is required as there is not any implemented management protocol yet. In this paper, we describe our implementation of the FRER protocol in OMNeT++. Besides, we implement additional control plane protocols, Intermediate System to Intermediate System (IS-IS) and 802.1aq Shortest Path Bridging (SPB), for network discovery and link layer routing to configure FRER properly for multipath communication. As SPB is the main instrument of the path reservation mechanism in TSN, our framework enables to simulate large-scale time-sensitive networks together with reliability and orchestration mechanisms. The whole implementation is available as open-source.