Design Synthesis and Optimization Strategy for Low Delay and High Bandwidth Utilization in Time-Sensitive Networking

Time-sensitive networking (TSN), as a solution to the nondeterministic communication of traditional Ethernet, meets the real-time and deterministic communication requirements of intelligent automobiles. There are three traffic types in intelligent automobiles, including time-triggered (TT) flows, audio-video-bridging (AVB) flows, and best-effort (BE) flows, and TSN proposes the gate control list (GCL) to control the transmission of the above traffic. The current GCL synthesis usually serves the hard real-time TT flows but ignores the delay of non-TT flows; and it introduces guard bands to ensure the noninterference transmission of TT flows, inevitably wasting bandwidth. Therefore, this article proposes a design synthesis and optimization strategy to improve the transmission of AVB flows and bandwidth utilization while ensuring the real-time performance of TT flows. This strategy first adopts the initial time window design to allocate the antecedent time windows for AVB flows, then transmits AVB flows according to the deadline to enhance the scheduling of AVB flows, and finally flexibly adjusts the time windows of TT flows and AVB flows according to the size of AVB flows to improve bandwidth utilization. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed strategy in improving the transmission of AVB flows and bandwidth utilization compared to the state-of-the-art methods.