A Heuristic Scheduling Algorithm for Time-Trigger Flows in Time-Sensitive Networking

Deterministic real-time capability is of great importance in network communication. Since Ethernet has been phased out, IEEE proposed Time-Sensitive Networking to meet the bandwidth and dependability requirement of deterministic transmission. 802.1 Qbv introduces Gate Control List (GCL) to specify the transmission timetable, but how to achieve the GCL becomes a difficult problem in TSN. Many ideas have been proposed, but the time complexity still has room to improve. Motivated by these challenges, in this paper, a heuristic method based on the as-soon-as-possible (ASAP) strategy is proposed. A feasible GCL can be achieved with low time complexity and the scheduling result is also satisfactory. The rule-based heuristic method first uses time margin to sort all flows into a certain scheduling order. Then a single flow scheduling algorithm is proposed to obtain GCL based on ASAP strategy. Finally, some test cases are given to compare the difference between existing methods and the proposed method. Results show that the proposed method has a better time complexity, especially in large-scale networks.