Absorbing Time Synchronization Errors Using Shadow Queues in Time-Sensitive Networking

Time-sensitive networking (TSN) is widely used in industrial automation and automotive applications due to its ability to provide deterministic transmission. To meet the stringent deterministic requirements of time-sensitive traffic, the mainstream traffic management mechanism time-aware shaper (TAS) relies on time synchronization among network devices. TAS schedules periodic traffic transmission using preallocated time windows. However, in real networks, time-sensitive traffic may not be precisely forwarded as scheduled, thus failing to achieve the expected performance. A fundamental reason is that the statically planned transmission schemes cannot accommodate dynamic time synchronization errors. To address this problem, we propose a novel TSN traffic scheduling strategy called robust TAS (RTAS), which utilizes a dual-queue gating structure to define a new scheduling rule for absorbing time synchronization errors to guarantee the real-time performance of scheduled traffic (ST). We conducted extensive simulations on OMNeT++ to study the performance of RTAS in industrial automation scenarios. The results show that RTAS enables deterministic transmission with imperfectly synchronized clocks and minimizes the impact of time synchronization errors on ST.