Enhanced Real-time Scheduling of AVB Flows in Time-Sensitive Networking

Abstract

Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) realizes high bandwidth and time determinism for data transmission and thus becomes the crucial communication technology in time-critical systems. The Gate Control List (GCL) is used to control the transmission of different classes of traffic in TSN, including Time-Triggered (TT) flows, Audio-Video-Bridging (AVB) flows, and Best-Effort (BE) flows. Most studies focus on optimizing GCL synthesis by reserving the preceding time slots to serve TT flows with the strict delay requirement, but ignore the deadlines of non-TT flows and cause the large delay. Therefore, this paper proposes a comprehensive scheduling method to enhance the real-time scheduling of AVB flows while guaranteeing the time determinism of TT flows. This method first optimizes GCL synthesis to reserve the preceding time slots for AVB flows, and then introduces the Earliest Deadline First (EDF) method to further improve the transmission of AVB flows by considering their deadlines. Moreover, the worst-case delay (WCD) analysis method is proposed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. Experimental results show that the proposed method improves the transmission of AVB flows compared to the state-of-the-art methods.