Enhancing Reliability of Time-Triggered Traffic in Joint Scheduling and Routing Optimization Within Time-Sensitive Networks

The development of new technological applications is driving the need for deterministic network communication that exhibits reliable behavior. This is particularly relevant for applications like automation and autonomous vehicles, which require real-time network responsiveness. This has led to the development of various technologies, including Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN). Recent studies have explored the optimization of scheduling and routing in TSN, as this is crucial for meeting TSN’s objectives. Current methods primarily focus on scheduling Time-Triggered (TT) transmissions, often overlooking the scheduling of lower-priority traffic types. Many of these methods do not optimize routing, and only a few consider reliability. In this paper, we present the Optimized Hybrid Deterministic Scheduling and Routing Plus (OHDSR+) approach. This method prioritizes communications, optimizing both scheduling and routing of TT communications, while also addressing the requirements of lower-priority best-effort (BE) communications, and ensuring the reliability of TT communications. We evaluated our approach using various problem instances. The results demonstrate our approach’s effectiveness in managing different traffic types and ensuring reliable transmission for TT traffic. Our model achieves significant improvements compared to the state-of-the-art REU-CP-R method, with reductions in total latency of up to 1.03%, total response time of up to 34.70%, and scheduling response time of up to 63.97%. Notably, OHDSR+ exhibits superior scalability, successfully finding solutions for all tested network sizes with a 100% success rate, while REU-CP-R achieved only an 87.5% success rate. This highlights OHDSR+’s ability to provide optimal solutions for networks of various sizes with minimal latency and response times.