On the Scheduling of Fault-Tolerant Time-Sensitive Networking With IEEE 802.1CB

TSN has become the most popular technique in modern safety-critical automotive and industrial automation networks by providing deterministic transmission policies. However, the data of TSN messages may be affected by transient faults. IEEE 802.1CB, a reliability standard in TSN, protects against such faults by providing disjoint redundant routes for each stream. However, the unique assumption may present a new challenge, i.e., an inadequate number of redundant routes that may negatively impact stream scheduling. This article presents an offline fault-tolerant TSN scheduling approach that considers such impacts for real-time streams (such as time-trigger (TT) and audio video bridging (AVB) streams). Specifically, we intend to calculate the minimum upper bound number of disjoint routes required for each stream to meet the reliability requirements, subsequently enhancing the network’s schedulability. We also propose a service degradation function for AVB streams when the network is under heavy load caused by redundant transmissions of TT streams. This function will maintain schedulability and reliability for AVB streams. Experiments with small- and large-scale synthetic networks show the efficiency.